Introduction & Argument
Originally posted to LowGenius.Net 6-Feb-2009. As I’ve been going through this process of tracking down and curating my old content, once in a while I come across something that still makes sense word for word. This article is now in seventh grade, so to speak – twelve years old – and as I re-read it for spellchecking and so forth I realize that pretty much every word still rings, and I wonder whether that reflects my own stagnation in musical taste, or if I’m unwittingly just being the grouchy old man, or if this is just an ongoing and unfortunate reality that I desperately hope finds a cure.
In the end I suspect it’s probably a little of all three. But I still wouldn’t change a word.
And for the record I know there’s bands out there that don’t suck. Some of them are friends of mine. It’s a hook to get you to read the bigger point about the emotional commitment of the artist to their art and why that’s required for art to be great.
Yes, I know. It doesn’t all suck, but there’s not much room for nuance in a headline.
And most of it HAS sucked, and sucked hard. There’s always been a problem of style over substance in music, and in every other part of the entertainment business. Unfortunately, over the last decade and a half, the suck has so far outweighed the substance that I’m really afraid a lot of people my daughter’s age (20) [she’s now 32 -jh, 2021] are losing the ability to even recognize quality music anymore.
Why does it suck? Oh, let me count the ways. The world is filled with bands and performers who are, at best, marginally talented. They rely on studio tricks and technology to substitute for talent, but the talent is only one part of the issue, and it’s a small part.
No, the real problem is this: what we’ve got now, by and large, is an entire generation of recycled imitative crap pretending to be the heroes they grew up loving. There’s nothing wrong with having influences and incorporating those influences into your work; that is, after all, where everything starts.
All these wannabe’s and pretenders spend years trying to learn how to imitate their idols, getting the chops and the techniques and the riffs and the styles down pat, but they don’t get it. What makes great music is not how well you play your instrument, or how many notes you can cram into a single beat, or how fluid and tasteful your fills are. What makes music great is one thing, and one thing only:
The heart of the musician.
THAT is what people don’t seem to get anymore. It’s all just flash and show and technical know-how, and there’s not an ounce of genuine passion involved, except for maybe the passion for money, ego gratification, and easy sex. Any asshole with corporate backing can make a record that will sell a half-million copies, but it takes something that you can’t buy, you can’t learn, and you can’t imitate, to touch hearts and move souls.
What’s Missing
Musicians don’t put themselves in to the music anymore…and what’s worse, the music public doesn’t ask them to. Instead, it seems like people are going to concerts so they can hear the songs played note-for-note as they sound on the CD. Not only is that not the point of live music, that’s directly contradictory to the very idea of live music.
VOLUME does not make music good. There is nothing even a tiny little bit special about seeing an artist go up and pantomime themselves. If that’s what music is about to you, then you may as well just say to hell with it, save some money, and start doing “listening party” tours where the musicians aren’t even involved – just get five thousand people together in a hockey rink with a giant PA and play the damn CD!
No. Live music is about broken strings and spur-of-the-moment extemporaneous speeches and singers who are hoarse at the end of the night and blood and sweat and tears and most of all, it’s about power. Not amplification power, but the power to move human beings. Speaking as a musician, I don’t much care if I get every note right when I’m playing live. What I care about is whether I can make you cry, make you laugh, make you angry or sad or wistful or hurt or horny. I care about making you love and making you hate. Even agreeing with what I say isn’t important, but feeling what I feel, THAT is what matters.
It seems like today’s crop of musical impressionists have completely missed that point. You know, Zeppelin had some really terrible shows, from a standpoint of technical musicianship [Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Special anyone? -jh, 2021]…but people loved them because they went out there and put their hearts in to what they were doing. They reached down, picked you up, and ripped your face off, and they made you come along on their ride for three hours whether you wanted to go or not.
This is why 4 Peace remains my favorite “Kalamazoo Scene” band even though a lot of people would say they were far from the “best” band on the scene. Not because they were the world’s greatest musicians – certainly they had legitimate talent and instrumental skill, but that’s not the point. What made them my favorites was simply that when they picked up their instruments, everything else in their world stopped and for that half-hour or 90 minutes or whatever, their hearts and souls were right there on display, pouring out of their speakers and into your face with all of the fire and fury that four pissed off Gen-Xers could muster. I don’t take anything away from any of the other bands on the scene, but that’s the band that, for me, consistently grabbed me by the throat and flat-out refused to let go until they’d had their say.
By the same token on a wider scale, that’s why I’m still a huge Pearl Jam fan, and why I dig Chris Cornell much…and why I absolutely loathe bands like Staind and Puddle of Mudd. I don’t care HOW great they are as technical musicians, all they are is shallow imitations of bands who actually went out and put their balls and hearts and souls in to what they were doing.
Watch this: Pearl Jam, “Alive” (SNL 1992) [Sorry it’s a FB post; NBC yanks this clip within seconds every time it’s posted to YouTube. Hilarious note: originally it linked to a file on Google Videos, that’s how old this article is. -jh, 2010]
That’s what a band looks like when they’ve got their heart on. More important, that’s what a band feels like when they’re in the groove. You can almost smell the nerves and excitement – this was by far the most exposure they’d had at that point – but by the time Ed rips that first “SAHHHHHn” out, they’ve forgotten where they are, they’ve forgotten the cameras, the crowd, Sharon Stone, the millions watching at home…all that matters, all that exists in those five minds for that five minutes is the groove.
The Magic
You can’t learn that, you can’t imitate it, you can’t bottle it, you can’t package it, you can’t put a surcharge and $20 for parking on it, you can’t control it, you can’t capture it, you can’t imitate it. All you can do is grab that sucker by the tail and hold on tight while it takes you where it wants to go.
That, my friends ($1 J. McCain) is the magic. That is why I’m a musician. Not because it gets me laid or makes me money or gratifies my ego, although it does do all those things at times.
I’m a musician because I have to be. Because whether it’s just me playing with myself (pun definitely intended) in a basement, or me and my band, whoever they might be at the moment, playing to a couple thousand people, that magic, that power, that undefinable thing that leaves me hollowed out and spent in a way that no sex, no money, no fast car, no drug, no woman, no THING ever could…that’s what matters, and I don’t give a rip if you can fool ten million people into buying your pathetic imitations and flimsy, saccharine parody: that is what the people and friends I respect from John Lennon to John Riemer have and were born having…and that is what almost nobody who so callously refers to themselves as musicians in 2009 could ever understand because they don’t have it, they can’t have it, and they wouldn’t know what it was if it slapped them in the face.
I don’t need a record contract or a multi-million-dollar tour or fifty grand in flashpots or computer-controlled laser shows, and I don’t much care if Britney or the Jonas Brothers or Coldplay are selling millions of records while I sit in a drafty shack in rural North Carolina re-rolling smokes from the butts of the ones I hand-rolled earlier. I don’t need a billion hits on a MySpace page [chuckles in 2021] or a billion dowloads of MP3’s to prove that, because it’s mine and nobody can take it away, nobody can water it down, nobody can say it’s fake or not good enough or not ‘accessible.’
That is what’s inside me, and that is what flows through me when I play regardless of who, if anyone, is watching, listening, or even gives a rat’s ass, and that is what is most emphatically NOT in 99% of the shallow, commercial crap that pollutes the airwaves today, and the best and worst part of it is that it doesn’t have to be a big secret, it doesn’t have to be hidden or kept private or kept away from anyone finding out. It can’t be stolen, it can’t be taken away, it can’t be bought or sold. It just is. Some of us have it, some of us don’t, but it’s sure doesn’t seem like anyone who is passing themselves off as a musician or rock star in 2009 could ever come close to understanding what that feels like.
And THAT is why rock music has sucked for 15 years.
[All of this applies to my writing, too. If you pay attention you’re probably seeing a theme by now. I’m real big on authenticity and sincerity and meaning it.]