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Rock Stars Need Not Apply
I really like this comment from Ted on the Radiohead thread:
If you go back to indigenous communities, living in villages and singing all the time, spontaneously making music. They didn’t have celebrities and rock stars. It was just regular people they knew making music.
I think there is a lot to be said for that. People even a few years ago in the US, would have a piano and have sing alongs sunday afternoon. it was a normal thing.
Rock Stars are products of a bottle neck. Scarcity. Supply and demand. Huge demand, small supply. Evening it it out gives you larger supply and smaller demand.
This is, I think, exactly what we are seeing now happening to music, thanks to the internet. There is suddenly a huge supply of music and musicians. Just about everybody seems to have a band and a bunch of albums. And that is almost not important any more. Especially if you are trying to “get noticed” - because everyone is trying to get noticed. And when everyone is shouting, noone can be heard above the racket.
But maybe no one needs to. Maybe modern musicians have been lead around by the nose to push a corporatized system of music which is not natural and not realistic. Everyone is trained (courtesy of American Idol, etc) to want to be the biggest rockstar of all time and make a bunch of money. When maybe all we should be doing is making music for our friends and families to enjoy: music that simply celebrates the fact that we have come together as people in the same space in the same spirit.
Also, if everyone collectively stops trying to be a “rock-star” with their music, then maybe people can focus on simply (1) enjoying themselves and (2) finding creative solutions simply to make enough money with their music to get by (the musical equivalent of what I do with this website). Think of it as a long tail approach to being a rockstar.
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:34 pm
OK,
I guess I will comment here. You are moving really fast through a bunch of different ideas. But what I see is a theme, in these last few posts of yours, and one thing that really interests me, is the relationship between creativity and power.
Like the relationship between wealth and creativity, Political freedom and creativity that leads to political power.
I would like to nail some of this stuff down. There is some really imprtant principles at work here that could be mapped out and understood and applied to other things.
Like you are talking about the Free masons and the Revolutionary war. These were highly creative people, that were open minded and rebellious, that established a Powerful nation. The Founding fathers themesleves were wealthy merchants, finding the status quo in order to have access to more wealth and create an atmosphere of creativity.
Creativity creates positive feedback loops that creates this upwardly spiraling vortex of power. Then people figure out ways to profit, from it, hierarchies form, the New Order becomes the staus quo eventually.
The trend of creativity creating wealth and changing how people think and act seems to spread westward. RAW wrote about this. Wealth comes from people using their neurons better to make better choices.
just what is goinbg on here with this stuff?
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:35 pm
edit:
That should be “fighting” the status quo. about the Founding Fathers.
October 4th, 2007 at 2:41 am
There has been a huge supply of music and musicians for decades. I can’t remember exactly where I read it, but I have read at least one statistic that there may have been something like 50,000 bands operating in the UK by the end of the 1960s. Which sounds like an unimaginable lot, but if each of those bands averaged four members, 200,000 people would’ve been working as musicians in Britain by about 1968 or 1969 (from your big super-bands like the Beatles and the Stones selling millions of records, all the way down the scale, as it were, to your middling pub rock blues band playing a Northern working men’s club every other weekend selling a handful of records if they ever got into a studio to begin with). As a proportion of whatever the British population was back then, that’s not too hard to imagine. The figure in the US would’ve been proportionately higher, obviously.
The difference now lies in the possibilities for the thousands of bands that exist now to be heard. In the 60s it’d involve a lot of hard work just to get recognised outside your immediate regional area. Now, theoretically, I can have my music heard by someone on the other side of the world without me playing there or even releasing a record as such.
October 4th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
This is a great deal of my motivation behind what I’ve been doing with the youtube covers, in a way, and with providing people the tools (tab, lyrics, chords, mp3) to learn the songs themselves. It fosters more of people bringing music to life, bringing it out of themselves instead of only passively consuming it, and hopefully, performing (covers, originals, it really doesn’t matter) for family and friends. I think you’ve brought up the olden day tradition of (literally, and I just realized where this term came from) entertaining guests.
This needs to be brought back. The parlor room, the sing-alongs, the putting on of little plays, all of it. But also, there needs to be more use of the internet in similar (but also - necessarily - unique) ways. I want to create that kind of intimacy and all-togetherness somehow with all those dear to me and not just those near to me.
One example: Benjamin Costello, a friend and fellow youtube performer has started doing these weekly live streaming concerts from his bedroom, called “Bedtime Melodies“. He creates a dedicated AIM(?) chatroom for listeners to discuss and interact with him during the show, shout out requests, etc… It’s surprisingly fun and intimate! It’s not fully ‘there’ yet in terms of what’s possible, or what I’d like to be possible, but it’s a good start.
Also, I just noticed this on his site. He’s already down with the revolution:
And as for rock stars…
The rock star and rock-star-worship are old habits that have worn out their usefulness. People need to stop idol worshiping and start just loving and being and mastering themselves - and encouraging the same in others. Celebrities and Idols have their place as archetypes I suppose, and their role to serve in society, but.. do they still? society is changing, and those kinds of roles may be becoming, on balance, less valuable and more destructive as forces within the collective consciousness. Maybe it’s time for “stardom” to simply be brought back down to the personal, real, intimate level (”starlets”). Rock Stars may inspire some people (but, inspire towards what? something good or something self-destructive?). Mostly it seems they just draw people’s focus and energy away from themselves, encouraging instead a fixation on external objects of worship. Rock “Stars” are more like black holes in that sense.
So kids, I say — take down your band posters and replace them with art made by you and/or your friends. Make your own rock star(let) posters for yourself and your fellow starlets. Surround yourself with symbols that reinforce positive qualities within yourself and those around you, and ‘fixate’ on your own (and your friends’) success and increasing awesomeness (self-mastery) instead of on distant rock stars that don’t know or care about you.
Of course, no need to hate rock stars. You can learn from them too. Nothing’s all bad or all wrong. They know how successfully become bigger-than-life characters in their own musicals, for one thing. They know how to surround themselves with the right people, get themselves hyped.. They know how to put on a good show (some of them, anyway). They know how to party…
But what am I sitting here talking about all this for. I have awesomeness-cultivating to do. I have a musical to write. I have music and rock starlet posters to make. Later, my pretties.
(This public service message brought to you By The Brooke)
October 4th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
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