It's time for renewed commitments to the future of music. This is a critical time for musicians because we are part of a major turning point. The old world is falling and a new one is rising. Internet technology presents a challenge to the old mafia-style business model of the music industry. The oversized monster can't move quickly enough to adapt and new patterns of distribution and production are being explored and developed. This does not mean everything will be necessarily better in the future. As long as people continue to think music was created for making money, we will only have "new and improved" "alternative" monsters that just perpetuate the same evils differently.
The tension between business and artistic authenticity has always been in rock music. The morphing of Elvis Presley into the hip-swinging caricatured product of Colonel Tom Parker's business philosophy was aided by television and movies, which led to Dick Clark's market-friendly packaging of rock'n'roll...which then necessitated a return to America's roots music in the mid to late 60's which, once commodified as "hippy culture", needed to be smashed by the Midwest proto-punk movement (the MC5, Iggy Pop and the Stooges) and bashed some more by the New York punk movement and turned on its ear by the English punks who sadly played out the tragic result of self-destruction for financial gain. Kurt Cobain picked up where the Sex Pistols left off but the "alternative" movement was once again absorbed into the economic monster of radio and major label monopolies. Now the internet is here and our ability to share music on a grand scale exposes the shortcomings of the dominant business philosophies when it comes to music. We are entering another new era.
Which is what's so exciting about being in music right now. But this is not just a movement in popular music. The relationship between music and business is a microcosm of the broader economic conflicts in our world. WHAT WE ARE DOING IN MUSIC AFFECTS MUCH MORE THAN MUSIC. Internet technology has revealed the underlying limitations of our entire economic philosophy when it comes to financial value. Take a look around. In our society, music is being used more and more, affirming its value to human beings, but labels operating on the old model can't quite figure out how to capitalize on that.
But they will. Once the shift is complete (whatever that shift might be in the end--toward independent subscription services or a grand monopoly of conglomerated mega-companies), the new world will be revealed to us, the world that we will accept as reality--"the way things are". When this happens, there will once again be great need for music that opens up the possibility of other worlds, that pushes listeners beyond reality, that prophesies what could be while reminding people of what is already within them--a spirit of some kind that pulls us out of the old world and pushes us into the new.
We know this new world is coming. We've seen glimpses of it already. All the walls of the old establishment are going to fall down someday. But they need a little push and pull. This year OVERHANG resolves to take part in the dismantling project. We of course can't do it all, but it is increasingly becoming clear that we have been placed in the middle of this change for a purpose. Not to build a fan-base or win awards or to sell beer and t-shirts, but to tear down the old world and lend our hands to the coming of the new.
There's a lot of work to do, so let's get started:
One of our concerns as a band is that technological development in the area of recording is being negatively affected by market forces which, to make a long story short, is causing a decline in sound quality. We became acutely aware of this problem during the mastering of our album this past summer. After getting it back from mastering, Joel and Nate felt that something had been lost from the original. The album definitely sounded louder and more accessible to radio, but some of the emotional nuances weren't there. The mastering process didn't turn our album into an artistic failure by our standards, but it did cause us to question as artists and as music listeners why albums aren't made available today at their highest sound quality? An article in the recent Rolling Stone Magazine breaks the problem down better than we could.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity.
Unfortunately, the article does not offer possibilities for the future of music. It seems to assume we are just in a downward trend toward poor sound quality. That's not necessarily true because right now we can only see the limitations of present-day technologies. OVERHANG is hopeful for the future of recording when we talk with Matt Newport of Black Lion Audio about his vision for recording equipment. There are also artists like Dave Fridmann, producer of the Flaming Lips and the second Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album, who is starting to play with digital distortion artistically rather than consider it an ugly mistake to be avoided. These are people looking to the future of music, not just bemoaning the loss of old glory days.
The most troubling claim of the Rolling Stone article is that listeners' taste is becoming and has already become so adapted to mp3 quality music that they are losing the ability to hear good sound quality. It doesn't bother me that people are starting to mix songs so they sound good on cell phones rather than on stereos. That makes sense. What is troubling is that there doesn't at this time seem to be a push for making cell phones sound better. Phone companies could take a lesson from Skype on sound quality. There is a marked difference in the experience of tele-communication when a person's voice maintains more of its nuanceful resonances. And if we're going to be doing everything on our phones anyway one day, listening to music, watching v-casts and movies, then why not make the experience better. The answer, of course, to make it simple, is that the technology is not there yet and it's too expensive. Perhaps we'll just have to be patient. But, in the meantime, it may be too easy to forget that music is meant for more than just sending back and forth from one place to another in cyberspace, is more than just a pile of information to be collected in heaps on one's hardrive. It's more than the chorus and the radio-friendly hook. Music is fundamentally sound. Accepting sonically impoverished music as a reality (just "the way things are"), then undermines the very basis of good music.