SoundCloud Gems: Proofsound
American Beauty was not so mesmerizing for its story so much as for Thomas Newman’s score : a sublime auricular dance that transformed a story of one man’s suburban midlife crisis into something surreal, arousing, and cataclysmic. The music, alone, told a story without needing aid of a moving image. It is this experience–expressing the story without the picture–that Denmark’s Proofsound has accomplished…
The Continued Importance of Radio Play: It’s Not What You Think
Pre-internet days, getting major radio play was a big deal—it was the only way to reach a large audience all at once, save for getting a spot at one of the big music festivals. Obviously, getting a video on MTV or VH1 also meant global reach—a viable excuse for spending ridiculous amounts of money on headline directors, special FX, and whatever else might elevate those five minutes on a godlike pedestal. As a musician and from major label perspectives, you were a success if you landed a Top 10 hit.
For music snobs, however, getting instant replay on the radio was reason enough to abandon a previously unknown band/musician (or at least unknown to the masses) as you retorted, “Sellout!” because they suddenly weren’t considered “independent music.” Getting play on the college station or NPR was still cool and respectable and all of us music snobs still fished for new tunes at live shows/concerts/house parties, mixtapes, and digging around on forums like Discogs once our internet connections were morsels faster than dial-up.
So what happened when everything went digital and online?
Our listening habits went digital and online. Why listen to the radio in your car when there’s SiriusXM or your iPod or a mix CD of tracks you lifted illegally from file-sharing services like Napster? (Not encouraging illegal downloads here. Pay for your music.) If you’re hip, you know about We Are Hunted, Hype Machine, and music blogs in general—you don’t need the radio. College stations like Radio1190 started streaming online, podcasts were invented, Pitchfork launched, and YouTube allowed for an influx of DIY music videos. In short, the internet facilitated discovery of spectacular unknown music and made more accessible the coolness factor associated with one’s music taste.
Fast forward to early 2011 when Arcade Fire took Album of the Year at the Grammys with the distinction of not being signed to a major label. Surprising? No. It was only a matter of time. That so many people in the industry and general population were blindsided was surprising. Where on earth had THEY been and what were they listening to?
Point: Radio play remains important—if only to understand the overlap of popularity between the internet and whatever Clear Channel is slinging. Does that change the opinion of a band receiving “airplay” on both mediums? Maybe. Maybe not. For music snobs, however, it might prove enlightening about their status as music snobs. Oh, no. Heaven forbid you might enjoy some of the same tunes that the lowly general public likes.
SoundCloud Gems: Baukhol
During a late-night jaunt on an interstate years ago, I tasted the first traces of music intoxication. The album was Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd and as physically lucid as I appeared, mentally I traveled somewhere else. A visceral connection with music is one thing, but rapture is something else–immobilizing, inflating, breathtaking. No matter what the tune, its ability to remove you from your current surroundings is paramount…
Sunday Slowdown
“Stella Maris” ~ Moby
Years ago, I drove the 36 home to Boulder during the hour that creates that purple-blue horizon between night and dawn—the stars still glinting in the night sky, the moon still hanging bright. Sunday mornings meant my headlights were the only ones trailing the pavement, as though I were literally driving from the night into the light of day. Had this track been created then, it might have scored those flights back home where I set off to Dreamland.
Break the Rules Only If You Know How to Do It Well
I’m not a fan of rules.
I’m that person that has a problem with following printed instructions if I can find a more efficient (read: better) way to do things. I’m the person that questions authority without question because I’ll be damned if I don’t have all the information. I’m that pain in the ass that has to fail at doing it my own way before I get serious about consulting “professionals” unless it’s something I’m quite certain I can’t possibly figure out with a dictionary/Google/etc. In short, I bend and break the rules any damn way I possibly can because I get more work (and better work) done that way.
I’m currently taking a writing course for professional development and while the class is aimed at writing for a certain type of publication, the textbook’s advice on style is maddening.
- Follow these guidelines.
- Readers don’t want to read _____.
- Do this—not that.
- Beginning writers do ____, so avoid that.
- And a million other things that are supposedly right and wrong about writing for a particular audience/demographic/genre.
Follow those prompts only if you ARE a beginning writer uncomfortable with your own abilities. Follow those prompts only if you DON’T ever read. Follow those prompts only if, from a mechanical standpoint, your writing sucks.
However, when it comes to style—in any medium—break the fucking rules. I’ve been writing long enough to know that constraining to the limits of the fucking rules guarantees stilted, underdeveloped, voiceless writing that swandives beyond short of absolutely everything it could be. How do I know this? Because I attempted to stick to such stupid rules for forever. Eventually you realize (hopefully) that some advice is meant to be chucked.
People don’t read David Foster Wallace or Joan Didion or Orhan Pamuk because they play nice, always pick the vanilla cone, and are magically without one kind of neurosis or another. People read these authors because the work isn’t generic, doesn’t follow easy-to-copy structure and formatting, and isn’t running around the mill. (And for what it’s worth, broken rules are fun. It’s fun to write against trend, it’s fun to read against popularity, and both of these activities are how cultural shifts occur.)
One caveat to rule snapping: you have to know how to do it and do it well. If you don’t have some sense of organized chaos upstairs, it’s not going to translate well—not on paper and not on life. You have to have an end destination: what are you hoping to accomplish and why? If you can’t answer this simple question, no one’s going to “get” whatever you’re trying to do. In fact, no one’s going to care.
