Pretentious Youth's Guide to Music

I must first enter into this with this statement: I do NOT disagree with conventional music or my teachers who are far more knowledgeable than me; I merely dislike the way it is being used in modern mainstream music. There are plenty of ways to use convention effectively which I may look at later. But for now I shall stick with blatant music deconstruction.

Ever since birth we have people telling us that music is an arrangement of tones that is pleasant to our ears. When we first hear our baby mobile lull us to sleep we are most likely to hear a simple tonic to dominant key change with a steady pulse and subtle dynamics as an equivalent to the feeling of being tired, and instantly we tie certain types of music to specific emotions or feelings that we have in our life. From the very beginning of our life we are subliminally told that music should begin and resolve. Without this as a young child we would assume the piece has stopped or is unfinished. Music has many unspoken rules that if broken, most people would avoid at all costs.

At the age of 15 I started to crave music that was not melodic in any shape or form, but purely complex and difficult to play: music that would fly in every direction with no exact key (at this point in time I was unaware of atonality, which I will get to in later chapters) so when it came to composing music in lessons I would jump at this opportunity and put in as many semi-quavers as humanly possible with accidentals spewed all over the place. Instantly this was discouraged by my music teacher who hence forth forbids me from using semi-quavers in any further compositions. Now looking back at my old work I must confess that it had a lot of underlying problems, regardless though I felt that it was a lot more interesting than the other work I made within that composing term where almost all work and solutions were dictated to me.

At the age of 16 I discovered harsh noise music with artists such as Merzbow. This completely destroyed any concept I had of music complexity and accessibility; it made me assume that all sound was music; anything can make you feel if you allow it to. And the deeper down the hole of experimental music I went, the more I could look at acts like Lady Gaga and Britney Spears and be ashamed at pop music, we are teaching people that music must be a fixed formula and entirely genre divided. And if this is not put into practice that the music will not succeed, regardless of what we'd like to think the industry isn't entirely to blame; it's a deep rooted problem that has been created by listeners in general getting more and more accustomed to a certain sound. For example, if you were to know nothing but poetry by William Wordsworth, you would assume that that poetry is the best poetry in the world. We could take this even deeper and compare the whole thing to the allegory of Plato's Cave. People are trapped in a cave just staring at the colours the light forms on the wall, and because that's all they know they expect nothing more. Only when they arise from the cave they realise there is more to life than the mere cave they were in.

Hence throughout these articles I will be looking at each segment of music and attempting to dismantle them one by one. What I will find through consistent analysis is yet to be revealed. But I look forward to it and if at the end you still wish to revert to pop; I will respect you even more.