dekstop: weblog

Just read David Byrne's Crappy Sound Forever!, in which he relates the evolution of popular and classical music as a series of technological changes, in a brief history from gramophone and microphone to MP3.

I liked his observation that Hip Hop "might be the most radical popular music around" as it's the first mainstream music purely made by machines, where the composition has no relationship to a live performance any more, where the idea of a band vanishes:

Most other pop genres retain some link to simulated live performance, but a song put together with finger snaps, super compressed vocals, squiggly synths and an impossibly fat bass doesn’t resemble a band at all.

At first I was surprised at his singling out Hip Hop (there is a huge amount of even more radical electronic music around), but of course he's right, Hip Hop is the first genre of electronic music to gain a huge mainstream awareness. And as genre borders are dissolving and electronic production methods transforming even the most boring white-bread mainstream pop it might well be the last. Everything is electronics now, Hello Computer.

My favourite statement, on how MP3 may put and end to music being a thing you buy, and transform it back into something you simply listen to:

What is also new and old is that MP3s return music to experience rather than being things, commodities. To some extent this technology also returns music to the social experience it always was, maybe not in the way Microsoft would like to link to in their ads for Zune, and not entirely about file sharing either, but somehow. It’s information, communication, as it once was.

And his guess on how MP3 will transform music production:

But is there a composing response to the MP3 and the sound of digitized compressed and private music listening? I don’t hear it yet. One would expect that private listening habits would result in a different kind of music being written — maybe a flood of ambient moods as a relaxing way to decompress, maybe dense and complex compositions that reward many replays and close listening, maybe intimate and sexy vocals that would be inappropriate to blast out in public. If any of this is happening I am unaware of it.

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