jeru

Every artist feels a pull to create something novel and interesting, and for it to be enjoyed and appreciated. Lifetimes have been spent on the subject of what makes good music, and many lives will yet be spent on it. As the countercultures of yesterday turn to the dogma of today, turn to the trash of tomorrow, we can see there is no clearcut, formulaic thing that one must do to succeed, but there is a pattern among all sorts of players. Their ability to create new, exciting sounds stems from a wide number of things, but of the most creative, most definitive artists and groups, there is a lot of commonality. When an artist creates a new style, they are not pulling it out of thin air, it is coming from their personal experiences and they coalesce stylistic elements and artistic concepts into something refreshing and exciting, yet familiar. They pay tribute to what came before by fusing their stylistic proclivities into a new whole. Every definitive turn in music came from interpreting and toying with conventions, and it’s becoming essential to push stylistics and create new sounds. The most definitive musical works of the past have widely been stylistically familiar, yet novel and explorative. The familiarity comes from pushing an existing style’s boundaries, either through blending, deconstruction and/or reconstruction, and so on, and these processes of taking a fundamental piece of style, or many, and changing aspects in a careful manner.

The artist’s struggle is to collect and amalgamate what one gets out of their personal experience in to something novel that one creates, and see it be appreciated. The choice one takes in this endeavor, as to what to take inspiration from and how to use it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Even the music one takes in should be taken into consideration and limited as well, so that this process of stylistic amalgamation can be an organic process to create new sounds. On the other hand, the purpose of art, as far as I can tell, is to communicate a personal and experiential message or idea through the expression of a theory or concept of creation. As artists, there is a drive to have your creations experienced and understood, a self evident observation, and it drives the point home that without a foundational reasoning behind the creation, that it will not prosper. Further, we look into and read into what we’ve seen, with pattern recognizing brains that seek a reason behind the creation, another self evident observation, delivering the same point again. The utility of art is in creation and ideation and conveyance of meaning through symbol/sign/form–or in other words, the how/what/when/where/why of creation–and “how” is always more important than the others.

In the how/what/when/where/why, the values that matter the most as applies to style are honesty and integrity. Honesty in music is as important as honesty in dialog, since the musical process is essentially a dialog anyway–between artist and viewer, as we express ideas with music just like language despite the fact it is a more experiential communication than with spoken language. While one can lie, typically people don’t like being lied to, and it’s much more endearing to be honest–and of course, one can steal, but typically thieves aren’t thought of as endearing either. Since, stylistically, and musically, and artistically, and conceptually, one should speaking, to the best of one’s ability, from a place of truth within themselves. If one does this, it will end up permeating everything one does and the elements of their style will gradually fall into place. There is no one way to be honest, no single method, any number of factors may play into it. It’s a question of stylistic and musical identity, and constructing an idea of what one believes music is or should be.