Whenever the end of the month comes and I am short on posts and there's nothing in the hopper in the way of ideas, panic sets in. "Let this not be the month that the streak is broken. Let a fourth topic come!" This has been a particularly busy month in which my mind has been preoccupied with my actual job, and I'm also preparing for a vacation. And for some reason, none of the usual sources of inspiration are especially doing anything for me.
And then right on time, Rick Beato posts another YouTube video with an almost perfect clickbait title: "The Real Reason Why Music is Getting Worse." I'm familiar with Mr. Beato's take on the kids' music of today-- for starters he hates autotune categorically. Originally (and I'm sure to some extent still) a procurer of an expert's view on what makes a song great, he one day succumbed to the temptation to whine about today's music, and millions of clicks later it's a topic he returns to time and again. You can't (and I don't) fault a gent for suckling at the teat of the golden cow. But from an aesthetic standpoint, from one old guy to another, I want to say "Dude! What are you doing?" Nevertheless, this proclivity of his to serialize his complaints about contemporary song provides video essays that can be argued with in blog posts-- and who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?
Beato is a multi-instrumentalist, studio musician and teacher. His unspoken beef with music today is essentially that much of it lacks the professionalism and credentials on which he built his career many decades ago. Technology has reached a point at which anyone can produce music without a degree in it or even any proficiency on an instrument. This is part of what rankles him about auto-tune and trap beats-- a recurring gripe in his videos. He has done a series of videos in which he listens to the top 10 on Spotify and critiques it as he goes. The latest is called "I didn't think the top 10 could get any worse"-- a purposely hyperbolic clickbait title that doesn't accurately describe the contents. As for the topic, well, the top 10 has almost always sucked in my lifetime-- at least 80% of it from day one. If you're in a complaining mood, it's easy to complain about music bland and predictable enough to appeal to almost anyone. For my part, while I couldn't hum any of what he listened to back to you on his latest slumming in the Spotify Top 10, none of it hit my ears as being in the category of awfulness of say "Billy Don't Be A Hero" or "I Really Want to See You Tonight", or other turkeys from my and Rick Beato's youth.
But to the video at hand, I again think the title oversells the meager content. There's a lot of hemming and hawing throughout. In keeping with the boldness of the assertion that he is revealing the key to contemporary music's suckiness, however, Beato says he will provide a presentation in 2 acts.
Act 1: Music is too easy to make - Right off the bat, I find the notion that it's a bad thing that music might to be too easy to make to be an elitist opinion. As a democratic populist, I celebrate when the tools that make the culture are available to all. As a sometime user of the Logic software that came with my computer unbidden by me, I have benefited from the ways that technology has made music production widely accessible. The phrase"music is too easy" hurts my ears. However, Beato's demonstration of what he means contradicts his argument. He compares the old days, when musicians had to be prepared to perform at their best in as few takes as possible in the days before multitrack recording and studio engineering, and recording engineers had to be conversant in the actual acoustics of their studios and how to capture the subtle colorings of voices and instruments, to today when the simplest of tracks can be (and usually are) highly engineered to remove imperfections in the performance and to create effects that would be close to impossible to sustain with traditional instruments; but his description of the process (and my own experience) belies the notion that anything about the creation of a track of decent music with technology is "too easy." As with anything, much of music is derivative and unimaginative. But so it has always been. Disco was a phenomenal form of music the best of which was produced by highly talented musicians, but its popularity ensured a glut of crass pale imitations that littered the airwaves. The best music then and now is the product of a mix of inspiration (or sheer luck) and skill. As far as Beato's lengthy aside that AI generated music both violates copyrights, hurts professional musicians and makes bad music to boot, he'll get no argument from me, but this is hardly in the same category as the music making by humans enhanced by advances in software.
Act 2: Music is too easy to Consume - Yes this is actually presented as "Real Reason Why Music is Getting Worse." Following a rather confusing demonstration analogizing the drops in the bucket that an artist's output is in the total marketplace of streaming music to actual drops of water from a stream that comes out of the kitchen faucet, Beato laments the days of his youth when if you wanted the latest Led Zeppelin album you had to work to earn the price of it and then drive to the local record store to actually purchase it. What a feeling! Today, there is so much music (100,000 new songs per day added to Spotify per the video) that Led Zeppelin would be lost in the shuffle. Moreover according to Beato, the way many listen to music these days, Spotify (or other streaming apps), there is no opportunity to desire and explore quality music. (This is not my experience; I feel no dearth of quality music in my ongoing playlist). To Beato, Music in a stream just becomes an undifferentiated gush that gets poured into your ear. It's as though there had never been such thing as radio -- the constant companion as one of my college media textbooks described it-- with its never-ending stream of musical product. Was music better when DJs played the crap out of the same song all day until you wanted to chuck your transistor radio into the river?
All of this raises a question, what does it mean to say "Music is getting worse"? What does Beato mean by music. When I think music, I think of an artistic expression of sound, words and rhythm that moves me or just gives me pleasure. I can find no shortage of new music that fits the bill. Truthfully if a song gets under my skin, I probably don't care if it was made purposely by Leonard Bernstein or by some fluke by AI. There is no mechanism by which Music in this sense can get better or worse. It just is and always will be as long we continue to make it. But I suspect when Rick Beato thinks music, he thinks "product". If music as a commodity is deteriorating, I think that deserves some cheer.
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