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SurfGuitar101 Forums » Surf Music General Discussion »

Permalink An article on the decline of Instrumental Music

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Just found this while surfin' the web. It takes a broad view of instrumental music ( classical, jazz, etc...) but makes some cogent points. I think the point about instro being like abstract art and what that requires in the observer is quite valid.

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/columns/features/why_americans_hate_instrumental_music.html?no_takeover

Danny Snyder

Latest project - Now That's What I Call SURF
_
"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

I'm back playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Danny,
Ever listen to avant-garde jazz or bebop? It's low level noise. Most listeners ears are in 4/4 time. Any listen past that tends to degrade quickly to non-listening.
Then there's the opposite end:
Ever go to a Springsteen concert? It can turn into 4+ hours of ear torture with his wailing away about who cares what. Most peoples' attention span to any listening is about 90 minutes tops; then they aren't listening anymore.

To another point in the article.. Disco, rap,hip/hop are dead easy... you just make up some dumb poem, spice it with profanity, and use a sampler for music.. who needs Julliard? Who really thinks Kanye West is a real musician? He's made a fortune - Yipee for him.

It's a different age - mostly. My son picked up on the Ventures of late.
He's expanded his knowledge of bass guitar by way of their music with some help from me. So - all is not completely lost.

My 2 cents
J Mo'

The death of American music is coterminous with the death of culture in the post-Reagan years. We 'can't afford' to teach kids anyhting anymore, and privatization of everything, especially education, doesn't valorize intangibles like culture. The only thing that matter in America, at the 'bottom line' is profit. People being able to understand things and participate in them gets in the way of raw profit. It's even affecting church life. People want to be spoon-fed pablum there too. No hard questions tolerated.
Instro is an art form that requires interpretation by the listener - the narrative is completely abstract and doesn't tell you what it 'means'. Dumbass amurrikans hate that. Every serious concertizing musician lives to play Europe because America is dead.

Squink Out!

JObeast,
Very profound observation - Don't forget to give us a holler when you get yourself in a war.

J Mo'

I'm always in a war. Please come help me out in Joilet.

Squink Out!

The absence of instrumentals in pop music hits shows the trend. What is popular is the fantasy of being on "America's Got Talent" and that means singing. Individual involvement in pop music usually means karaoke and that too means singing, and nothing but. Instrumental rap music? Nope. What's popular is what's easy and cheap, and that means singing.

Popular music is made by promoters and financial backers. They manufacture demand. Their interests are obviously in vocalists and not in instrumentalists. This is the core of the issue.

When my band performs (surf instrumentals) visible audience enthusiasm is primarily among Baby Boomers and children under ten years old. The people in between don't seem to hear it. When they talk to us about it they say they have never heard anything like it. Oh, I do believe them. Their tastes and habits have been molded by pop music promoters.

The kids bounce around to the beat, grinning. Surf guitar music (I play) is accessible to them. It is concrete, just as children are, not abstract.

Insanitizers! http://www.insanitizers.com

JObeast wrote:

I'm always in a war. Please come help me out in Joilet.

I moved to the West Coast from Springfield, Illinois. That too is a war zone. While there I visited Joliet, just long enough to get a dramatic tee shirt from Conrad's Harley-Davidson store. Joliet looked scarier than Springfield. However, the scariest I've seen is St. Louis, where I lived before Springfield.

Insanitizers! http://www.insanitizers.com

I tend to say things in an uncompromising way; it gains few friends.
The America of music and sharing that we grew up in has been replaced by a dystopia of selling and conforming, where sharing is impossible. I wish I could be proven wrong, but I have been living too long in the wasteland to be optimistic about 'culture'. As the author spells out in the article, there is no turnaround in sight – people here have lost their ability to interpret, to engage, to guess at meaning. We have now a profoundly unartistic populace. Invention and free thought are already unrecognizable to the vast majority.
Orwell conveyed the strategy of soft mind control perfectly when he wrote that words would be eliminated to silence the thoughts they symbolized.

Squink Out!

I have a theory... or perhaps a denial based fantasy. Element 1. As we get more and more manipulated and overloaded by the various media and the interests bombarding us - words will become suspect or just noise. Element 2. Marijuana is rapidly spreading across the land as an accepted norm. Element 3. Certain types of instrumental music may become more acceptable or even desirable in some corners of the planet.

Or, I need more coffee... I can never be sure.

mj Cheers Blah Blah Duh Groovy Guitar Help Hmmm Popcorn Shocked ROTFL WTF? Picard Face Palm

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mj
bent playing for benter results
Do not attempt to adjust your TV set.
https://www.facebook.com/Bass-VI-Explorers-Club-179437279151035/
https://www.facebook.com/Lost-Planet-Shamen-366987463657230/

Cool

This a problem of our society that transcends throughout. We like to be told how to think. This can be seen in our politics. America needs to be spoon fed everything including music. We identify then cling. It's a shame to think of a vast population that cannot interpret a melody line and create a landscape in their imagination of what the song is about. Mankind has used music as a doorway to another dimension of their spirit for ions and thankfully we in surf still utilize that gift.

The Kahuna Kings

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Kahuna-Kings/459752090818447

https://thekahunakings.bandcamp.com/releases

Last edited: Nov 29, 2015 05:14:59

To me it's decline in music in general. My 24 year old son home for the weekend says he can't find anything new he likes either, so it's not just me being an old fart.

I also find myself exploring and listening to more instrumentals. i add a lot of them to the daily playlist at our local radio station at which i am a volunteer.

all of the arts are suffering from this new age of electronic toys IMHO, and the need for instant gratification.

www.surfintheeye.com

Being the kind of guy I am, I shrug it all off. I play what I like and listen to what I like. There is great (IMHO) instrumental music in other parts of the world - like Europe. Communications have made it a "smaller world"; so accessing it via DVD, CD, or youtube is pretty easy- a lot easier than even a few decades ago. I never took to disco; but liked (some) punk and new wave.

Liking the sound a a base raw guitar, surf instrumental and gypsy jazz floats my boat. So, the hell with everyone else.

J Mo'

JObeast wrote:

The death of American music is coterminous with the death of culture in the post-Reagan years. We 'can't afford' to teach kids anyhting anymore, and privatization of everything, especially education, doesn't valorize intangibles like culture. The only thing that matter in America, at the 'bottom line' is profit. People being able to understand things and participate in them gets in the way of raw profit. It's even affecting church life. People want to be spoon-fed pablum there too. No hard questions tolerated.
Instro is an art form that requires interpretation by the listener - the narrative is completely abstract and doesn't tell you what it 'means'. Dumbass amurrikans hate that. Every serious concertizing musician lives to play Europe because America is dead.

I think you are accurately touching upon the systemic issues with what is going on in regards to the current landscape of 'music listeners'. Music education is definitely square one where myself and others were the last generation to get music education in school. A lot of schools have even slashed band programs from junior highs so it only exists in High Schools now.

I don't feel there is a decline in music. While pop music is pretty unlistenable to me, that ratio of good music to bad music is still pretty constant. We are just beat over the head with the pablum. There is absolutely wonderful music out there, you just have to dig to find it. And there is a lot of good stuff out there, even with the internet the music world is every bit as insular as it was several decades ago. More immediate, but every bit as insular. Remember zines? Remember going to your local independent record store?

We've gotten lazy, sadly. We got spoiled.

An interesting read, thanks for posting it. I think similar issues exist in the UK, there is a real decline in music and it seems that only singers matter.

On mainstream radio, most of an 'instrumental' intro is talked over and the DJ only shuts up when the singer starts. This even applies to a local rock n roll DJ who even plays a few rock and roll instrumentals - but we barely get the whole thing. It's almost as if music doesn't matter, but voices do.

But I also think mainstream music is less varied than it ever has been, but it music has always been fashionable - there was a time when polkas were popular, no one would listen to a polka these days!

http://thewaterboarders.bandcamp.com/

Sure there's plenty of good music out there, that's not arguable. The problem is how little it matters and how the mass cultural trend is so decidedly anti-music. Selling is mass quantities is all that matters, all and nothing gets played widely that does not sell very widely. We can play all we like for free, but the system is against such music because it does nothing to help some rich controller get even richer. If we rise to their notice as the next Taylor Swift, they will take away our ability to write our own music, as too much is riding on it to allow a mere performer artistic choices. This is like the Hollywood movie studio system. Watch David' Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" for a spiritual dissection of that soul-destroying system. But I digress.

The culture has been hijacked, obviously, by big money. What we are noticing is a palpable lack of vibrant democracy which expresses itself in artforms. Adorno wrote that the future of music was that everyone would make it, and thanks to digital home studios, it's come to pass, this general musicianship. The problem is relevance: there's way more bands than fans. What we do at the fringes remains invisible to the mainstream, utterly irrelevant to their daily consumption of popstars.

When I was studying fine art as an undergrad, a professor in painting talked about how rare creativity is – one can paint all day everyday and only occasionally a breakthrough in process, conception and technique occurs. The artist lives for those moments, as does the scientist. Even rarer is creative work which becomes cultural. That is, artwork which speaks cogently to the audience and is taken up as symbolic of the spirit of the times and even of the human condition across time.

We have now entered a moribund cultural phase where it has become impossible for the people to discover and elevate art to that level, because sincere and original work, which is not a product of a fine-tuned studio machine (cf. Atlantic article about the minds that craft Taylor Swift/Kelly Clarkson/ B. Spears/Kei$ha tunes)remains unrecognizable to mass audiences, and is even spurned as antisocial. Now we move into the hyper-conformist Brave New World of Huxley and beyond.

Bernie Sanders said recently that the destruction of culture and society that we decry under Communism has been effected just as thoroughly under the current monstrous form of Capitalism. We are discussing the World According to the Market.

Squink Out!

I don't disagree Jo. I might point out that these are the same conditions that gave rise to Punk. I suspect we are in for a period of multilayer music movements. The Taylor Swift/kanye kardashian folks, the legacy acts, the younger folk and whatever trips their trigger. But I also suspect that there will be a layer of "gentlemen musicians" who do music for it's own sake, have the means of self support outside of music, have access to technology to record it and put it out there - for better or worse and effectively stand outside of the "system" because they are less dependent.

mj

mj
bent playing for benter results
Do not attempt to adjust your TV set.
https://www.facebook.com/Bass-VI-Explorers-Club-179437279151035/
https://www.facebook.com/Lost-Planet-Shamen-366987463657230/

Cool

This is getting WAY too far into politics - which part of 'no politics' as one of the main forum rules do you not understand, JOBeast?

You must live in a very different country than I do, BTW. What I see is that we now live in a world where pretty much every niche artistic form can have a shot at not only surviving but even thriving (artistically if not commercially), as long as there is a small group of people willing to support it. Who cares about what's going on in the 'mainstream'? Maybe some teenagers do, but that was always the case, and it's clear that today the 'mainstream' has less meaning than ever before - as do your favorite bogeymen, the music business corporations, most of which are desperately clinging on to anything they can find to keep them afloat. Over the past 20 years with the help of the internet, consumers got unprecedented level of choice and they responded with unprecedented diversity of art and music. That seems like a very good thing to me.

Finally, you really sound like Frank Sinatra and my grandfather and millions of other old fogeys decrying first the rise of Elvis and then of the Beatles, pointing to them as the 'end of culture'. My dad got the same lecture from his dad back in the early '60s. It's the same old shit every time. 'Culture' is always under attack and being destroyed - and requiring of protection. It used to be just conservatives that made that case, now we're seeing the progressives more and more sounding like conservatives. You gotta love it.... Personally, I'm much more interested in culture that is an organic thing, reflecting changing tastes and new technology, rather than any 'culture' imposed on us from the above. Today we have a very complex and varying culture, allowing all of us to pursue our own interests and engage in our pursuit of subjective values. Sounds great! Anyway, you think you'd get the culture you want if the government was to give it to you? Let's then talk about a bridge I have for sale...

This is all completely ridiculous, a bunch of old men bitching about the changing world, and pretending it's all happening for the first time ever... Rolling Eyes

Ivan
Lords of Atlantis on Facebook
The Madeira Official Website
The Madeira on Facebook
The Blair-Pongracic Band on Facebook
The Space Cossacks on Facebook
The Madeira Channel on YouTube

BTW, JOBeast, how much cultural support have YOU provided this year? How many surf CDs have you bought?? How many surf music shows around Chicago have you attended, by bands such as the Cocktail Preachers, 13 Tikis, Roger & the Wraybands, the Revomatics? How much of your money have you put where you big mouth is to make sure that surf music continues to be a thriving alternative to the horrible mainstream?? I would love to know.

Ivan
Lords of Atlantis on Facebook
The Madeira Official Website
The Madeira on Facebook
The Blair-Pongracic Band on Facebook
The Space Cossacks on Facebook
The Madeira Channel on YouTube

Ivan,
As usual you show yourself intolerant of any social-economic analysis which runs counter to your own. Who was it that said, "when I hear someone say 'culture' I reach for my Luger"?

Squink Out!

JObeast wrote:

Ivan,
As usual you show yourself intolerant of any social-economic analysis which runs counter to your own.

Completely unlike you, obviously.

SG!01 is NOT a place for socio-economic analysis of anything. If you actually engaged in any analysis of real surf music, whether classic or new, I'd much more tolerant, but it never happens. It's just the same old high-fallutin' BS. Enough already. I thought progressives were against environmental pollution - well, your posts are environmental pollution in this forum.

Ivan
Lords of Atlantis on Facebook
The Madeira Official Website
The Madeira on Facebook
The Blair-Pongracic Band on Facebook
The Space Cossacks on Facebook
The Madeira Channel on YouTube

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