Any good musician will have a hard time explaining pop music. But like true love or a bad rash, they'll know when they've got it. Pop music is contemporary music enjoyed by the masses. Let's refer to it as now-music for short. If you write the pop music you hear on the radio (or the iTunes store homepage), you'll get a perfect example of now-music. But by the time you've written your now-music, it's become then-music and someone is making money while you're living at your parents. So you must attempt to accurately predict and then write future-music. That way, by the time you're through writing, it's become now-music. This involves some guess work. My roommate, a market analyst, will tell me all about what's happened so far. He can then guess, with a certain degree of uncertainty, what's to come next. But the bottom line is that no one knows. Same with pop music. How then do you write future-music? The good news is that "Humanity doesn't do backward." (Words of encouragement tossed at me by a friend last Saturday.) As long as you be yourself, you'll be combining elements of everything you've ever heard thereby producing something totally new. You will write future-music which will then become now-music. But I almost forgot: if your music sucks, no one will want to listen to it. And then you've failed at writing pop music.
Should we go for fame? Perhaps post-mortem glory? If you pen something "ahead of your time," it will eventually be recognized as great work, astounding work, genius work. Nothing sounds quite as unfulfilling as laying in a box in the dirt, while everyone dances around above celebrating the music they didn't used to like. It's not my fault they didn't like it. I was just too future and not enough now.
I must be a good musician: explaining this was hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment