thesunbrothers

Thoughts too large for this morning's brain

I have woken up with my head not quite in a beer cloud, but certainly a light mist. I have no idea why. Only a couple of drinks were enjoyed during a post mortem of Tuesday's failed vocal takes. Anyway, it is partly our reason for scrapping them that I've been occupied with chewing over this morning in the shower. Apart from the odd tuning defect, the problem was really that the tone didn't fit into the song properly - not on a technical level, just an emotional one. This is not the first time that inexplicable emotion has ruled our hands regarding which takes do and don't work.

A little while in recording studios large or small (or in your front room in west London, whatever the case may be) and the expression feel rears it's ugly head. I suppose that this is the standard term for the concept I'm describing. What it leads me to suspect though is that music (and probably many other forms of creativity - but yet again I plead a certain ignorance of this broad "others" category) behaves like an energy - it is not really created or destroyed so much as discovered and harnessed. Moreover, creating it is perhaps a discipline of controlling and shaping instinct.

This is quite a big frustration, especially when writing. When you write a good song, the ego is barely involved, but when you write something rubbish you usually believe at the time that you are doing something deeply important* (* a survey of n=2 I must admit, but never mind). The worst part of this is that the times when you really *need* to write are usually the latter - when you are clouding the operation of the subconscious and putting barriers in the way of your real ideas. Which, to be frank, is a bit of a bitch.

The love of genre

We seem to have developed an obsession with categories. In music (for I know about little else, I'm afraid) this roughly translates as an almost rabid obsession with genre.

If you happen to write or record music, one of the first questions you usually get asked is "What do you sound like?". Then begins the inherently negative process of genre selection. Musicians are encouraged to respond to this (both through reading interviews with proper bands and through the terrifying pages of musical self-help one finds all over this medium) by naming a genre or a list of other bands they sound like(or preferably three they sound like and one unfashionable one that they don't just to add that extra bite of eclectic chic) .

Call me a foolish old pedant if you will, but doesn't that negate the idea of novelty or originality before a note has even been played? It doesn't take much of a genius to notice that since the general theory that everything's already been done and a creative artist is only a sensitive magpie became the consensus, most mainstream music has turned into a glossy extended advert for whichever lifestyle subgroup that band happens to dress like.

Not that I'm denying the relevance on the sensitive magpie theory (often shovelled into the bag marked postmodernism), more just pointing out that such a mechanism does not particularly facilitate freedom of thought and exprssion - one of the things I always thought was a pretty large part of the point of creativty.