Who's killing music? Find a mirror, perhaps (reject, tradition, coffin)

[Flappycat]

Okay, I want you to pound on a hollow log for a while and tell me exactly how wonderfully musical it is. How about you stretch an animal hide over a stump and call it a drum? Yeah, you can make some pretty nifty stuff out of animal skin and pieces of wood, but even then you're using tools, man! You're still using something other than your own flesh and blood to create sound.

Unshockingly, people who complain that music that was made with the help of computers don't advocate going completely back to snapping our fingers and clucking our tongues to make music. In fact, I haven't encountered one of them that is nearly as accepting as I am of vocal percussion as an artform, which very neatly expresses to me what the real problem is.

The problem seems to me that they're just going through the same stuff as every other generation in history. It's something new, so they refuse to accept it. It makes creating new and beautiful sound easier, so they refuse to accept it, just as fans of the lyre probably described the harpischord as the last nail in the coffin of "real music" while more enlightened individuals were taking hold of it and using it to take music to heights unseen by Man for the next few hundred years, which brings me to my next point.

You see, new ways of making music often make it easier to produce the sort of vibrations previous generations considered a musical miracle that was the product of a lifetime's work of honing and perfection. The mistake the traditionalists make is reflexively viewing people who "resort" to such things as disingenuous or lazy, and, yes, a lot of talentless profit-seekers do seem to grossly get away with replacing talent with technology they didn't have a part in creating. I can see where they're coming from, and, unlike them, I can see why the view is flawed and just a little bigoted.

The thing is, a new method of creating music is useless if you don't stretch it to its full extent, and this is where another problem seems to come in. You see, making it go anywhere at all requires something a little different from reproducing the same sounds that can be made using a lyre or a flute. When given a new musical medium, it can't be fully justified unless it is used to fashion a whole new form of music. Again, however, it is rejected by the same crowd that was giving it flak for producing uninspired fakes. Why? It doesn't sound to them like "real music." It doesn't sound like the music they grew up with, so it must be worthless.

What I'm referring to, in case I haven't already made myself clear, is the unwaveringly negative attitude toward techno among the more stuffy musical intellectuals. I value the old forms of music as much as the next cat, and earlier generations have produced...some phenomenal stuff. It hasn't lost its value, and neither will anything that was truly virtuosic and inspired. A truly wonderful mind only comes along every couple of centuries, and we hold onto them for a reason. The thing is, music isn't limited to the best of what was produced in your generation or the generations that came before it. If you're just going to throw out everything that isn't made to resemble what your generation produced, well, that's the clinical description of a bigot.

Music isn't worthless just because its makers don't outright worship the things that you love, and music hasn't died just because you don't recognize anything that is made today. It wouldn't be called art if we just kept producing the same sounds in the same order with the same instruments. We wouldn't worship virtuosos if all they produced was something we could listen to through a tape recorder with the push of a button. Music really would have died if it had ever stopped changing and renewing, so I think that techno's most scathing critics really would be the murderers of music if they had it their way.

There have always been people who felt that something that was new to them, such as heavy metal, rock, and even jazz, was going to be the end of music. How many times do they have to be wrong before we just tell them to shut up?

[Eynah]

I would say that the death of music has something to do with human nature. The fact that we dislike, or sometimes shun, new things.

The old things haven't died out at all. Classical? People still composing that Genre. Jazz? Yup. Insert Music Here? Yup! It may not be the SAME, and there might be more of it, or different twists, but it's still there.

I've also found that I think it's a bit rude to say that all bands coming around today are just doing it for money. I don't think it's that at all. For some, it may be, but for others, it's the love of music. I think you can tell who it is, as well. But, music isn't something that should be gone into just for money, as it's a VERY risky business and you can lose your shirt.