Every Ending a Beginning

There is a term for a musical phrase whose ending serves also as the beginning of the next: an elision. Few musical phenomena have such fitting symbolic use at this time of year, as one year melts into the next. Honestly, January 1 is an arbitrary date, and constitutes no more official a beginning than does Chinese New Year or Rosh Hashanah. But as humans we seem to need beginnings and endings as a way of measuring our progress and reminding ourselves of both the tragedy and the miracle of our own mortality.

So every year, as December 31 passes into January 1, I celebrate the many elisions that have come and gone in the passing year. I want to take a brief moment to thank the few people who actually read this silly thing. It's an outlet, and is important to me even solely as such. But for those of you who do read it, I hope you enjoy reading it even half as much as I enjoy writing in it.

Here's to the upcoming year, the beginning of some wonderful experiences, happiness and health. Cheers!

The Crusty Artifice of Pop Music

In recent years, one curious division amongst contemporary pop musicians occurs between musicians who perform their own compositions versus those performing works by professional songwriting teams. This differs markedly from the distant past, when the composer of music was the true creative force and the performer was a mouthpiece for the composer. Now, music lovers are reduced to saying that, for just one example, Avril Lavigne is a more viable musician than, say, Britney Spears solely because Lavigne writes her own music. In many eyes, Lavigne's status as songwriter makes her immediately viable, since it has become so rare these days to find a pop star who actually does write his or her own music.

Strangely, it seems that to many people, having written one’s own music in today’s prepackaged, sanitized-for-your-protection world of popular music makes one necessarily musically viable. Most listeners are apparently not deterred if the music that person writes is trite, meaningless or unoriginal--if the performer wrote it herself, goes the theory, it must contain some greater amount of personality or sincerity--and thereby, meaning--than the latest of the cookie-cutter hits.

People today are searching for meaning, clawing for it in a world that has become so overgrown with artifice that we hardly know what meaning is when we see it. This conundrum is represented these days most aptly by so-called "reality" television. These programs purport to expose the drama inherent in real human interactions, but instead present viewers with a slickly produced, fantastic version of reality. In many ways, reality television must be so if it is to be profitable. Not only is it obviously a part of the artifice, it is a part that is sucessful only because it brazenly claims not to be. Likewise, we now find ourselves immersed in music where today’s fresh new image, deftly crafted from demographic numbers and dollar signs, is sent to market, destined to become tomorrow’s mass-culture reality.

With this trend in mind, the pop stars of today cannot be viewed as musicians in any purely creative sense. More accurately, they have become strictly recreative--singing, dancing figureheads of social institutions that push a particular angle on modern life and personal identity. Certain pop stars, like Madonna, have been fortunate enough to market themselves from a variety of different angles, thus extending their shelf life. In reality, however, this is more a feat of creative salesmanship than innovative music-making. Undoubtedly, Madonna will be remembered far less for her music than for the evolving images of womanhood that she represented over the course of her career.

This truly highlights the sorry state of popular music as a commercialized product as we find it today in America. Popular music is, indeed, everywhere: in commercials, in the backgrounds of television programs and films, in automobiles, elevators, office radios and iPods. And as is the case with any other commercial product in a capitalist society, the goal has become to see who can produce it the cheapest and sell the most of it. The music industry--for it truly is a factory built for mass production--has systematically lowered our artistic expectations for music so that it can sell us less art, less meaning, for more money.

Our choice should not be between the pop star who writes her own music and the one who does not--that seems a slim set of choices indeed. It should be between blindly buying what pop culture peddles and learning to listen critically to music in order to to decide for ourselves what is and is not artistically appealing.