Defining Results...

For some reason I can’t quite explain (perhaps it was all the Fashion Week articles in my New York Times RSS feed) I was hit with an overwhelming urge to re-read Zero History last week. In the course of doing so, I came across this passage:

It’s all about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.

Of course, Mr. Gibson was talking about clothing styles, but the “industrialization of novelty” is, I realized, a base level instruction set for the music industry. The British and their former colonies are best at this, of course, inventing genres at the rate of a couple a week, it seems, but every level of the music industry, from a potential musician’s first ham-fisted attempts, on up to the A&R guys that grease the major labels’ remaining machinery, operates on the industrialization of novelty.

There are three factors that drive this event, in my opinion. They are:

1. Consumer desire to find More Like This. A genre identifier provides some ease in this regard.

2. A label’s desire to build upon the accidental success of an individual artist, or the success of an artist from a competing label, to satisfy consumer demand. (See #1, above.)

3. An artist’s desire to capitalize on the success of another artist.

I find it ironic that electronic music, which is arguably the most forward-looking of the various styles (and note I use “style” rather than “genre” here), has some of the strictest rules. Granted that there are some hundreds of distinct genres within the style known as “electronic,” each of which has their own ruleset, with over-arching meta-genres (e.g. House) which contain sub-genres (progressive house, minimal house, deep house, acid house, et al.; in fact a new one just showed up, “fidget house,” which is like minimal house made with a deep house soundset, arghhhh!) One could easily describe any track from any of these sub-genres as “house,” of course, because house music has three key elements: four-on-the-floor kick drums, a bit of swing, and a hi-hat on the “and.” In this system, the sub-genre identifier is arguably more important, allowing a deeper classification in the “I Like This” hierarchy, because one can’t be expected to like Farben’s “Beautone” just because one likes Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body.”

Atemporality, however, should be the end goal of any musician, and in fact, any creative endeavor. Mr. Gibson points out, later in the book, that well-made articles of clothing don’t wear out. They wear in, and artificial distressing and aging is used to hide sub-standard manufacturing methods. This also applies to music. A well-made piece of forward-looking music (think: Sgt. Pepper’s) doesn’t ever wear out. It wears in. An artificial construct built to capitalize on the original (the movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring Peter Frampton and the BeeGees) sounds ludicrously dated.

The net result, in any event, is that you hear a song you like, and you do a little research and discover it is identified by Style:Genre:Sub-Genre. If it is electronic music (or, you know, ska or something), this means you can almost certainly find dozens, if not hundreds, of tracks that are more or less exactly like it, and quickly get saturated with hearing the same song in various keys, with some minor tempo drift and slightly different synth sounds.

Obviously, there’s no parthenogenesis here. A musician needs a creative sperm to fertilize his imagination egg (there’s a mental image that’s gonna fester…) and this almost always comes from someone else’s creation. You hear a song and, for some reason, you want to re-work the idea in to your own thing. Or a working method, or whatever. Another caveat is that we can necessarily date electronic music via the technology and production methods used, since electronic musicians are habitually using the latest technology and methods. There are exceptions to this, of course, and atemporality again rears its head.

My point, if I have one, is that one should draw from a deeper pool of inspiration than “ZOMG I WANT TO MAKE A DUBSTEP TRACK BECAUSE THAT SHIT PAYS!” Genre and sub-genre identifiers are at best a marketing tool, and at worst an artificial limitation, and shouldn’t be used to define your creative output. It’s time to opt out of the industrialization of novelty.