Occasionally, I get emails from Crawdaddy! readers (Such potty mouths!). This one, from singer/songwriter Steve Tanglewood from Washington (whom I met via eBay) became the inspiration for this week’s column. Steve’s question was simple; the answer, however, is not. Steve asks, “Where are we at, musically speaking? That is, what is your observation of the current American music scene?”

To answer where we are musically speaking, I have to, at least in part, do so technically speaking. We have reached that sci-fi place (albeit without the sexy costumes and flying cars) where technology touches every aspect of first world culture. In music, technology doesn’t just touch it, it caresses or clobbers it, depending on who’s wielding what. So, speaking technically first, we are and have been in a sort of music-tech stagnation for some time now, at least throughout this decade, but arguably longer. Tech stagnation isn’t completely inert. There is always some momentum churning, some small bit of growth like a stunted tree struggling to rise up in the absence of sunlight. That growth in our industry is in refinement of existing technologies, and has been for some time.

The various forms of software inescapable in today’s music creation environment do the same thing; they’re just getting easier to use, and the base feature set more standardized. I think we’re at a point where Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software and hardware has become interchangeable, even though they don’t always play nice with each other (and even that is somewhat homogenized). If you know one DAW, you almost know them all, or at least the learning curve is less steep. They all do high-def audio—the last big buzz—even though in most cases, the final product is a lo-fi MP3, or a mid-fi CD.

This lack of innovation is evident in the major music industry trade shows over the past few years. I attribute part of it to the consolidation of market share within a single corporation—Avid, the company that owns Digidesign and M-Audio. Digi and M-Audio are leaders in the high and low end of the music production market. To hear retailers and the competition call it—Digi and M-Audio own the market. So it’s no surprise that Digidesign is often called the Microsoft of the music tech industry (MI). This is due in not just to what seems to be their market ownership, but to their reputation for being ruthlessly competitive. Similar to Microsoft, the merits and dollar value of Digi’s technology have been highly debated in the way certain kinds of PC and Mac users go at each other. The technology is measured by how well records sound coming off of Pro Tools (Digi’s flagship product), how easy and intuitive it is to use in a professional capacity, and what is mathematically happening to the audio as it gets processed. I think they generally win the ease-of-use argument, and lost the detailed technological ones until the release of their Pro Tools HD system a few years ago. Bottom line—it’s still being debated, and much of the argument is centered around prestige (more on that later).

Before Digi/M-Audio’s apparent stranglehold on the market, due in part to long-standing brand recognition, the MI space was full of small companies long on inventiveness and short on marketing. All but a few of these small companies have shut down—These engineering groups where, perhaps, the next big thing would have been developed, disbanded, cashed out, and got jobs at some conglomerate. Meanwhile, a good part of Digi’s engineering efforts seemed to be in preserving their legacy technology, and the status quo they’ve helped to establish. Who knows what would have happened to our industry if the competition were fair, if the small companies, not beholden to any past development or large corporation, were allowed to thrive, to develop and invent and push us into a new direction instead of supporting one that was invented almost 20 years ago. Brutal capitalism renders the market a scorched battlefield.

We are at a point today where Pro Tools, Cubase, Nuendo, Sonar, and Logic are equal in power, but not in price, nor prestige*  .I’m on the record for not suffering prestige lightly but I do understand that a commercial studio open to anyone probably needs to have Pro Tools, because that’s what many clients will ask for. A commercial studio not having Pro Tools would be like a fast food joint not having french fries. Pro Tools remains the most expensive and exclusionary (regarding third-party hardware and software), and Sonar is the most affordable. All have fairly powerful ‘lite’ versions that are given away in bundles or sold cheaply. 

I am horrible at predictions, but I do expect wireless to be a new, hot thing once it’s ready (think of the time we’ll save not having to wrap up cords after a gig!), and real-time online collaboration (musicians playing together over a network) will probably re-emerge, though this time it may actually work. I also expect iPhone bands to be some sort of thing in the near future. I’m not sure what kind of thing, maybe just swinging your iPhone as the next form of innovative musical performance. As a guitar player, I find that kind of depressing. Laptop bands are old news, though usually quite odd. Yet laptops and other computers on big and small stages are now very common.

Given all the above, coupled with how sampling previously recorded songs and audio has augmented music creation, technology, and consumption to become an integral part of all three, I think the bar will continue to lower for songwriting, production, and artistic merit. Frankly, I fear an entire generation of kids growing up without ever being moved deeply, viscerally, by music. On the other hand, everyone gets to be a rock star, everyone gets to perform, be it on a plastic guitar with Aerosmith, or by tapping the screen on your phone for pennies a minute.

These two phenomenona—missing the power music has on the human spirit and our myriad of emotions, and musicianship becoming a game or sport—are related. Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin. Maybe the forms coming together—a breakup, a Beatles song, and a beer, or world weariness, Peter Gabriel, and English rain, are so rare a confluence that their scarcity helps invoke the emotion—the tears, the goose bumps, the sweat. Now we’ve grown so accustomed to the beat that we tune it out, or only let it in so deep. Is it a song to move you or to let you know your mother is calling?

I’ve always found movies suffer when the score and soundtrack are nonstop. As much as I need music, and I do need it, I also need silence. The best songs threaten silence, and the best pauses give it. Not to get all Deepak on you, but being present, if only for a moment, is a deeply spiritual thing. I think that once upon a time music brought presence (and the drugs took it away). A song in a moment, and a moment in a song, intertwined like snakes in their divine slow coupling. One of the enchantments in music is its ability to give presence to the now. Another is to transport you to a when. Conundrums are everywhere.

Will these two elements of rock ‘n’ roll be diluted as we soundtrack our lives, filling the ego’s time with things to listen to? Will we only have the distraction of sound instead of the presence of music and its ability to deeply transform and transcend the moment?

To sum up, we passed the crossroads a long time ago. The road less traveled makes for a bad business model, so they merged the roads; we have music and play it too, and much of it tastes the same. It’s easier to make, but that doesn’t make
it better.

And still the song remains the same. Okay, the song is longer, wider, and has a 360 deal. But it is the same song. And it is those artists railing against that song that keep rock ‘n’ roll alive. It is now harder than ever before to find the bastions of the muse, like finding the magic needle in a barn full of needles. But as long as there is pain, joy, love, and fear, there will be some unassuming kid becoming a musician in a way that lets us find ourselves once again in between meaningful spaces of silence. It won’t be easy, and someone will probably need a tetanus shot before we’re through. But the discovery will always be made. College radio will, hopefully, always be there to help get the word out. I find that much quicker than sifting through countless Facebook and MySpace pages, an act that is like trying to pick an ice cream flavor out of six million different offerings. 

You can fake many things in rock ‘n’ roll (is it sweat or glycerin?), but you can’t fake moving a crowd of three or more people in a bar, or on a corner. And those people will tell their friends, who will tell their friends, one of whom will be a DJ in college radio stations, or (egads!) an A&R rep for a label, and a new snowball gains mass just as the last one forms a puddle of sludge.

*Cubase and Nuendo were once owned by the small German company Steinberg, and are now owned by Yamaha. Logic was owned by the small German company Emagic, and is now owned by Apple. And Sonar is still owned by the small US company Cakewalk, though bets are being laid down it gets acquired by the huge Japanese music company Roland very soon.

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Crybaby, Cry (Old Enough to Know Better)

Pitching Pop

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