Why Is Music So Dead, Or Is It Just Me?

My reflections inspired by a question raised by Angela Nagle

Writer’s note: So I wrote the below, mostly last night, in a bit of a huff since the subject of this post is a long-standing point of contention for me. Reading it now I think it belies something of a grudge on my part. Like most young musicians I too wanted success and I can blame it all on the industry or the culture but the reality is at one point I just got sick of it all and made a conscious choice to do something else. I’ve sometimes looked back and thought that I just didn’t have enough motivation or guts or whatever it takes to succeed and I do think this is partially true. But I also remember how garbage the music scene was in the 90’s and 00’s and how dispiriting it all was for a lot of young musicians like myself. Much of the below is a trip down memory lane and to some might read like pure Gen-X whinge. So be it. I don’t regret the time I spent as a performing musician even though it feels so ethereal and distant at this point. Read on if you’re still interested, otherwise, see you next time.

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I just finished Angela Nagle’s short essay on the sad state of artistic production today. Here is her concern:

I thought that there would always be a steady flow of cinema, music, fashion and fiction, which were absolutely central to life until a decade or two ago. It was what people talked about. It was what ambitious young people dreamed of creating. Every weekend the culture supplements would have something or somebody in the arts to be excited about. There was always a great music act to hear live or a new book by a favorite living author to anticipate. Talking about politics was for a small joyless niche only.

This is a topic I have thought about for a long time. As an adult living through the last three plus decades I watched as film and music died a slow and then fast death. Visual art — painting, sculpture — has been fossilized for decades. Angela suggests that globalization and loss of a sense of place may be to blame. I think this answer, vague as it is, has some truth to it. But there are more direct and profound causes I can point to, from my own experience, for the state of the arts today. I focus here on music because that is where my experience lies. Film and publishing are largely dead for some of the factors I mention below but there is an ideological political project that effects those arts as well that, I think, isn’t as relevant to music.

I should also say that my goal here isn’t to denigrate anyone who is producing their own work in this stultifying era. I don’t want to come off as just some griping old sourpuss and my goal is not to discourage artists, ever. There are plenty of talented people today as in previous decades. As I lay out below, my main gripe is with the entertainment industry and arts culture as it currently exists and how their business model and underlying assumptions have limited the potential of an entire generation of artists.

This topic is large and complex and I am not covering everything here. Cultural exhaustion brought on by decadence and a sclerotic and dying empire are factors but more amorphous to describe. We all know of the corruption and sleaze that have overtaken the US and “the west” over these past decades. This has been documented in many ways and by far more knowledgeable writers than myself. What I do know is my own experiences of this decline as it relates to the business of music from one musician’s standpoint. As such I try to lay out the terrain in this one sector of the business of art — some of which can be applied to a lot of the decline we see around us in art and everywhere else. This is an ongoing topic of discussion and I am following in the well-trodden footsteps of guys like Steve Albini who have previously documented their own experiences inside the industry. His critiques go back 30 years, as do mine. The difference here, and I hope my stories will be somewhat amusing, is I am writing from a personal perspective that is necessarily limited but should hopefully provide some interesting insights.

As a musician I had a front row seat to this sad decline. I’m not an artistic snob but I do think there has been a degradation in the expectation of what it means to actually mold and be a musician and artist. I think those who, immediately upon gaining some fame, license their music for commercials etc. do themselves and art a disservice by allowing their work to be instantly commodified and turned into “content”. I don’t necessarily blame the artists for this since in most cases it’s the business that forces this on them but they do have a choice and to the extent they can, they should avoid this “lucky” fate. It is fundamental to the way art has been cheapened into a great mass of nothingness. Artists have to eat too and this practice is a result of the sad neoliberal era where everything is reduced to its value in dollars at the same time the dollars are themselves cheapened. Isn’t it ironic?

I’m not really interested in the difference between “high” and “low” art, nor am I fixated on the distinction between “amateur” and “professional” that degrades our experience of music and art. It’s been interesting because I’ve played with musicians that mainly pride themselves on their technical proficiency and also DIY types that come out of the punk ethos. I find that, among the former, musicianship has been turned into a mere craft and the result is boring and lifeless. Musicianship should develop organically by learning to play the tunes one likes and ideas that come to one’s ear. Too much music these days runs in a machine-like maze of proficiency which, ironically, is occurring at the same time computerized music becomes more naturalistic. Strange times indeed.

One thing I noticed in the 1990’s and 2000’s was there was a deep insecurity among musicians who wanted to hone their technique and become really good. This scene, such as it was, produced insecurity and fear. The resulting sterility of sound and creativity I found among this class of musician sent me looking for less pretentious and fearful people to play with. It seemed like there was a choice to be made: I could compete with humorless, insecure and un-creative types coming out of the music schools or I could have fun with the wild kids many of whom were a bit sloppy technique-wise but who were fun, alive and creative. Music was never about competition for me, and I wanted to have fun when I played: invent and see what happens, then laugh at the joy of creation.

I started my first band in high school with my three best friends. I was the only one who could play an instrument already when we met in the 8th grade since my mother suggested I start taking lessons when I was 7 or 8. Thanks mom :). My friends and I decided to form a band because we all loved music and each other and thought it would be a blast. One friend picked the bass and the other two started learning guitar. Within 6 months we started jamming together and within a year we were covering bands from Rush to U2 to The Smiths. We stunk at first but got better over time. The thing was that we had fun. My parents were very tolerant (they had already let me play drums in the house for years) and so every weekend my friends would get a ride over with their amps and guitars and we would take over the living room and jam for all day. We performed at schools and at these things they called “battles of the bands” at the Y, or we would perform at someone’s house — wherever we could. There were definitely better high school rock groups around but we didn’t really care. We just loved hanging out together and making music. So that’s what music was always about for me. We’d break in the afternoon and go around the corner to Gloria’s Pizzeria and laugh and shit-talk still high from playing. TBH it was never as much fun playing in any other band.

The reason I bring up all this ancient history, aside from the fact I haven’t thought about any of this in a long time and it’s fun to reminisce, is that I still don’t really understand this distinction we make between amateur and professional musicians. I spent a year in London in the mid-90’s performing with a free jazz group. We played around the city a lot and the thing that impressed me about that music scene was there didn’t seem to be this same insecure demarcation line. And I think the reason, at that time, was because the UK still had a vibrant arts community that enjoyed quite a bit of government support. Even in the late 90’s and 2000’s many US-based indie bands would spend their entire summers touring through Europe playing tons of government-sponsored festivals and making the bulk of their income during those 2-3 months. Austerity killed all that.

David Bowie said, before his sad death from cancer in 2016, that if he was trying to make it in today’s music business he would never have succeeded. Think about that. He said there was lot of government and producer support for bands back in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. Musicians could spend their time practicing and playing rather than having to hold a full-time day job to pay the rent. And music producers would spend years developing those with even a bit of talent. Bowie’s first couple of albums feel unformed compared to what came later. Today he would never even get the chance to hone his craft with the aid of excellent producers, etc.

George Martin famously said The Beatles sounded like crap when he first had them in the studio. He nurtured them because they had something special in the way they related to each other: they were charming and funny and he saw potential there. This way of seeing and nurturing artists simply doesn’t exist today.

It’s intimidating and terrifying to have to go it alone as an artist. Artists are notoriously insecure and self-centered. When there is scarcity they eye each other suspiciously and don’t form productive scenes. Healthy artistic scenes cross-pollinate and inspire. Producer attention and encouragement motivate. Confidence is a default requirement for great art and it doesn’t come from nowhere. There needs to be largesse, a bit of what today we would think of as luxury, for the artist to develop. I saw none of that playing in so many bands back in the 90’s and 00’s and today, if possible, it’s even worse. So what kind of musician can struggle through all this artistic austerity and soldier on? The “scene” self-selects for those with the most inbuilt confidence — a trait which doesn’t always coincide with great talent.

Musicians used to be able to actually make a living performing at small clubs. In London in the late 90’s clubs were starting to charge musicians to play. I’m not kidding. Here in the US a band would be lucky to walk out of a gig with $50 between them. Why did that change so much from earlier decades? Well, rent and other expenses for clubs are very high these days. But that’s not the main reason. Something changed in the culture — a lack of appreciation for what a good artist does — is. Some of it I blame on the fact that every young guy with a guitar thinks he can get up on stage and people will want to hear him, regardless of whether he can play or not. And I’m not talking about being able to play guitar like Prince or Zappa. I’m talking about being able to play at all. I can’t say which came first — the devaluing of the artist or artists devaluing themselves — but I have a hunch.

Another factor in the decline of the music business was the decline of the A&R guy — artists & repertoire. Albini loves going off on these assclowns. A&R is a fancy name for a guy who goes around and listens to bands to find talent, then lies to them and robs them. It didn’t start that way but that’s where it ended. I have stories about these guys, and they were always guys, from the 90’s that irritate me to think about. The ones I came into contact with all seemed to be rich kids who got their jobs through nepotism and thought they were geniuses. I’m sure there are decent guys that work in this field but my experiences were not with them.

These dudes had far more regard for themselves than any band. I once shared a cab home from the airport with one of them and all he could talk about was all the models he was fucking. If he had an ear for music I’m Nesuhi Ertegun. Another guy I knew had been playing in a band that got signed by some big label (more of a curse than a blessing given the way bands are routinely robbed) and the A&R guy forced them to axe him and replace him with one of the two guitarists for budget reasons. Bass is not guitar and he was a very solid bass player. Either drop him or they wouldn’t get signed. This kind of demoralizing, music-disrespecting penny-pinching shit is only part of what these A&R schmucks have wrought but it’s indicative. I have other pathetic stories but I won’t bore you with them here. Suffice it to say the bulk of the A&R gatekeepers were a bunch of talentless morons who got paid a fortune to dick around and play god to whatever desperate hungry band their gaze alighted upon. Never enough for the nepo-babies of wealthy industry insiders and yet, do these shitheads even exist anymore? Or has their role too been outsourced to the internet crowd sourcing algo? Inquiring minds don’t give a shit.

So tie all this together and what you get is a business run by corporations, allegedly in the business of producing art, that have a complete lack of care or concern for what it takes to actually do so. All we have today is greedy corporations looking for prepackaged products to sell. Hence Oliver Anthony’s offer of $8 million after he had basically already made it. MBAs run everything and they are running everything into the ground, especially art (I won’t get into what they’re doing to healthcare). Art, and the artists that make art, are not fucking widgets for fuck’s fucking sake. And this phenomenon — the devaluation of art into widget-like commodities — is the biggest reason why music has so little cultural relevance today. Neoliberal predation is a devouring sickness and it has infected every part of our society. It should be no surprise that art has so easily succumbed to the disease.

So where do we go from here? I honestly don’t know. Western culture has been declining for decades and I don’t see the MBA class and nepo-douchebags waking up anytime soon to what they have wrought. Collapse is all I see ahead. Perhaps that will force a return to the basics — to reality — at which point we may finally attempt a reappraisal of the assumptions we suffer under. Then, and only then, might we see young and hungry artists as what they are: sensitive creatures that need a bit of care and feeding to grow to their full height. Either that or those of us that survive will be living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and all of our pretensions will be washed away.