a couple of chill as monkeys
I composed this my junior year of highschool, I'm 20 now, someone else can figure out how old I was because I'm too slow for that.
I showed it to some of my buddies, one of them said he showed it to a kid in his music theory class and e said it was super cool.
He was a complusive liar and I'm pretty sure he was just saying that to make me feel good lol.
What is it though? It seems like a dumb question but it’s one I’ve been asking myself for some time.
I’ve landed on this: Music is a collection of sounds (or lack of sounds) that is meant to be consumed as art. It’s a pretty
bland interpretation of what music is but I think that’s how it should be. Music can be many different things. You have the
easy listening, background music. That’s usually just pop. Doesn’t mater what era pop you’re looking at, pop throughout history
has been meant to be listened to in a shallow manner. You have very clear objections to this that need to be acknowledged
(The Beatles (Rubber Soul and forward), Bjork, any “art pop”), but for the most art, that sentiment holds up. When people push
music past traditional boundaries, that’s when something cool happens. Some bands that do this very well (in my opinion) are: Magma,
Frank Zappa, John Zorn, Mr. Bungle, Bull of Heaven, Brain Eno, Aphex Twin, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Tatsuya Yoshida. These
are just some of my personal favorites but others like John Cage (who has some really out there compositions), Edgard Varese, and
most of those old conservatory dudes are really great and in a lot of ways still hold up, but not as well as the old dudes who
pioneered electronic music. There’s a whole world out there of old experimental electronic music that fascinates me to no end.
It’s just not all that listenable, some of it is, like old Joe Meek, but most of it is only cool to me from a historical point of view.