spiel the beans

First off, good timing with the emusic, since they've just sent (or at least I got) an offer to join and get 75 free downloads.
I've done at least one trial before and stocked up on some great things--they have such a strange and awesome selection.
Like, I got about 15 Fall songs that I only had on 80's era poorly mastered CDs; got some Turtles I only had on vinyl; ditto The Seeds; discovered that Roky Erikson did a cover of VU's "Heroin" back in the 70's (the cult fave covering the cult fave); as well as a handful of tracks by Hoodoo Gurus, Martin Newell and the guy that wrote "Dazed and Confused" (name escapes me).

I recently entered Sitting Next to Brian into Pandora.com and was happy to see that now I can have my own station based on what they think my music sounds like. I wish I'd copied the description--I can't seem to get it back. So far, the only artists I've heard of who come up on the SNTB station are REM (early, thankfully) and John Wesley Harding.

I also entered one of my songs for a free critique from TAXI song-placing service. It got a 7 pretty much across the board. Made me wonder how much work is put into the free entries. But it also confirmed what I've always believed: I am the most above average guy around.

For my bday or for xmas or one of those Dark December Days that I like to abbreviate and soon after alliterate, I got an iTalk--which is an awesome thing that you shove up your iPod and can instantly record stuff--the recordings are great quality too.
I've not used it as much as I want, but have communicated some good ideas while driving at work and stuff.

Anyway, the other day, a concept appeared before me and seemed so clear and developed, but the iTalk was outta my reach. By the time I got it, the early morning grandiose idea was gone.

But it had to do with music, genres and money and respect. Lessee if I can recreate:

Let's take blues music.
Origins: displaced African Americans. Most likely illiterate and without a penny to their name.
Complexity: when it started, the blues had no set form. Listening to the earliest known blues, it's much more interesting, intriguing and complex, musically and lyrically, than the watered down...well I'll get to that. Still, it was black folk music, required no training, and was more a form of communication among a repressed minority than a form of entertainment. Really, you could play it with one string and a broken bottle. it never asked for respect or to be invited to the white house.
Legacy:
Blues enjoyed a brief period in the 60's when some rockers (early Fleetwood Mac for example) set out to bring back the weirdness of the earliest blues, but add electric instruments, drums and the trappings of the day. Basically, it wasn't all about 12 bar, 1,4,5.
But since the 80's, blues has become something that many popsters (the blanket term I will use for myself and many of my musical friends and bands I like) would like to avoid at all costs. It seems formulaic, predictable, and basically like eating toast for every meal. It's also appealing to a middle class white audience that may like it for all the same reasons we dislike it. There are no surprises or challenges. And for some of my generation, for what blues has become, it really seems like the simplest, most boring kind of music to play, and puzzling as to why, say, the Beatles would revert to playing endless blues jams when they were bored, when you know that inside those craniums were the seeds of "Across the Universe", "Let it Be" and "All Things Must Pass". That's the generational thing. It was the basis of their childhoods--not the basis of ours.

I just read an interview with Eric Burden, where he says that when War was his (all black) back-up band, they would often refuse to indulge his love of blues because they really felt "Uncle Tom-ish" (their words) backing him up while he lived out his fantasy of not being a white bloke from England.

Anyway, so much for my concise form.
Ok: Blues came from black poverty. Requires no training. In the post-rock era, has become music for middle class whites with a lot of money and little interest in seeking out other music. For the musicians, it's for guitar players who like to solo, singers who like to growl and sing about the simple things in life, and rhythm sections who never get bored doing the same thing all the time.
Still, if you're an older person, regardless of color playing blues, you're gonna be respected and perhaps have a good shot of making a living.

Classical:
Centuries old, comes from Europe. It's as vast as the ocean. It's as confounding as calculus. It's as haunting as an October wind. It's as beautiful as the minute after a June shower. And...it can be as mind numbing as trying to read a foreign language. Requires tons and tons of training. For me, it is like a foreign language, or like bird calls. I am completely passive when listening. Classical musicians get nothing but respect and awe from me. In fact they god damn intimidate me.
Again, you can age gracefully in this most complex of musics.

Pop:
Let us declare (again) rock music a dead genre. Rock was Zeppelin. Watching The Song Remains the Same the other day with Ning and Bezo, you are reminded "oh yeah..that's what ROCK is". Open shirts, gongs, bowed guitars...stuff that's dead and probably never coming back.

Pop, by definition, is constantly reinventing itself. It is what is happening now. It is a song by someone trying to write a new song that is obviously influenced by something(s) that have gone before, but isn't necessarily part of a genre. Pop has no structure. There are many possibilities. You can quote Brian Wilson quoting Bach; and then quote XTC quoting Syd barrett; then blend a mellotron and a Big Muff. No one will bat an eye. If you're lucky, 8 kids will nod their heads to it.

I've learned this first hand, by writing dozens of songs without knowing the names of the chords I'm playing. Songs I've heard throughout my life get scarmbled in my unconscious and are regurgitated in alien form. This doesn't make it idiotic, I don't think, because they all have different structures, tempos, lyrical themes, twists and turns.

Many of the classic rock generation have reverted to playing blues because they're out of ideas (or they want to go back to their roots--so their publicists say).

But this stubbornness we popsters have to always keep moving creatively, to slip away like a jelly fish as soon as someone thinks they have us pegged...it's what keeps it alive. It's by nature, contrary.
As soon as "indie pop" became a genre, it was no longer indie.

Blues will always be blues--it's set in stone. As is classical. As is jazz. As is classic rock, polka, etc. It's music for the people.

I guess what I'm arriving at is, as long as we popsters insist on following our muses and not doing what people have heard before, we'll never make it to old age respected and revered and popular and rich. There will never be a House of Indie chain of clubs for people with money to blow; and there won't be a Julliard or a Tanglewood. There will be indifference, puzzled looks, one band in 500 that "makes it" and 8 geeks nodding their heads up front.