What Will Tomorrow Bring: The Future of Music

A 14-year-old french kid posted a youtube video a few years ago. Some folks noticed that he had effectively redefined the way music is made using free software and an 8x8 button pad, total cost under $500. By placing clips of "39 songs I like" at his fingertips, ready to be triggered on his command, he created   music from music. Goodbye to medieval mixing and scratching. Hello to the mashup renaissance. Trigger groundswell, millions of views, sensation, fame, and of course a record contract.

What he did was just an evolution on widely-used electronic music methods, but it kicked the art to a higher playing field. Perhaps less acknowledged than the "holy shit he looks 14" aspect or the "woah, his buttons light up like Star Trek" reaction is the fact that he showed the world how this Novation Launchpad could be used to drastically lower barriers to entry in music creation. Yes, you still need artists and instruments. Yes, you still need talent and creativity. Just like remixers needed a song to ... well ... remix, music mashuppers (mashers-up?) start with existing music. The difference is that they deconstruct it more thoroughly into tinier components, extract the most amazing and juicy bits, blend them with other ingredients (including original compositions), and make the old music into something fundamentally different. The entire corpus of human music has become raw material for a slow and quiet teenage-bedroom democratization of music creation. When this spills out onto the popular music scene, things will never be the same.

Lone bards used to travel and sing a capella. Something big started when one picked up an instrument to create harmony and melody to augment his voice. One thing led to another and ... Beethoven's Symphony Number 9.

Phon:  Greek root meaning "sound"
Sym: Greek root meaning "together"

Mashups and symphonies are both the musical equivalent of molecular gastronomy. This is not looking at a goose and thinking "I'll fatten that up and roast it." This is looking at a goose and thinking "foie gras and boysenberry mousse on dehydrated Rogue River blue cheese chips with a garnish of chateauneuf-du-pape pearls." This is meta-meta-meta cooking. It takes a set of skills to run a dairy farm. It takes a different set of skills to create amazing blue cheese. It takes yet another skillset to make blue cheese chips. To achieve the foie dish above, a chef must abstract from all that and take finished products (cheese chips, fois gras, wine, etc) as raw ingredients which he transforms into something new and even more sophisticated. In doing, he breathes new life into old flavors.

Beethoven needed a mind-boggling array of talents and skills to formulate his symphony, but he didn't need to be able to play every instrument perfectly. He was a genius mashup artist, just like Madeon.

Silversun Pickups’ Lazy Eye melts in my mouth

I like to ridicule those who describe art, wine, coffee, or music in arcane stretches of unimaginable imagery and allusion. As if one could write a metaphor for a taste. WTF do "smoked exotic sandalwoods" taste like anyway, and why would you want that in your wine? In truth, only they themselves can really get meaning out of their descriptions. Yet they insist on publishing them for all of us to read and feel intellectually and perceptually inadequate about. Assholes all of them.

But in this case, I’m the asshole because the words I'onna use to describe this song are as arcane as the best the Stone has to offer. But in this rare case, they are the only and the perfect ones to describe the feeling (and that’s exactly and all it is).

Butter. Smeared across hot raisin bread. The initial Smashing Pumpkins-knockoff riff just keeps ticking rhythmically along throughout the entire song, mostly just below the cloudcover, but at lucky moments popping up above so it can be noticed. Nice to know you can count on it to always be there no matter what else is going on. It’s so sweet. So simple. So innocent -- from way back in our boyhoods, but also from way back in rock history. Pre-teen and pre-Pumpkins in fact. The simplest rock, played by the truest garage bands. Old college bands like Ween and Breeders and the like. No engineering needed or allowed here. Yet they make that plasticy hollow cheap-amp guitar sound swing and nearly twang.

The rhythms are what makes it so young. The nervous energy of youth uncontainable despite it’s owner’s best efforts. Quick and repetitive and simple and feel-good and unabashedly obvious like a habitually bouncing knee under the dinner table. Ripped baggy jeans, skater shoes, ballcap, and a cracking voice when he ventures to open his unsure mouth. Careening through everything at top speed because he KNOWS that whatever comes next will be even cooler.

And then the song picks up and screams out, takes risks, and flourishes, just like the boy in those daring moments of blind courage in the face of fears and uncertainty. Drink what the senior hands you. Talk to that girl. Kiss her among your fumbles. Drive home drunk and get away with it. And then call your buddies the next day to talk about how you shouldn’t have gotten away with it. Those moments with friends which he will someday realize defined his personality for the rest of his life. The lyrics, in that Ween-dead-ringer voice, fit the metaphor “I’ve been waiting all my life…but it’s not quite right …I’ve been waiting for this silence all night long … it’s just a matter of time…”

Yet again resurfaces the nervous, repetitive rhythm which drives the song on steadily, which is your teenage life’s steady heartbeat through all the fits and starts, ups and downs, excitements and boredoms, adventures and mishaps, growths and losses, contests and comparisons. That repeating phrase “everyone is…” but am I ? Do I rate? What question could be more age-appropriate to ask? Do you suppose those Silversun dudes meant any of this? Whether they did or didn’t I’m sure they relate.