Caws Radio

"There's Sometimes a Buggy", and the Science of Song

First, a little about my job today, told backwards: All during work I was remembering that conversation in "Mulhulland Drive" between the director and the cowboy, and it kept a smile on my face. While walking to work, I saw a student crash his bike and fall in some mud. He got up and rode off, and while I was still laughing to myself another student rode past me and I could hear him making some kind of "bike-riding techno music" with his mouth, and this made me laugh even harder. Before leaving for work I locked myself out of my apartment and ran around in the rain looking for Chad.

Now, about music:
I decided today that knowing a lot about the concept of music itself does not gaurantee musical talent. Case in point: eating lunch at a friend's place today, I caught part of a show on OPB which featured a middle aged woman talking about music. She was saying something about how music is a series of waves, sound waves that oscillate and fluctuate while travelling through the air before meeting your ear. Then she said, "and I try to incorporate all these facts and concepts into my music, so a lot of my songs are about science..." Then it showed a clip of her performing. Imagine a middle-aged yuppie woman wailing lyrics about sound waves and science over the worst early-90s dance-pop you've ever heard. Then place her in front of a screen with projections of stock science experiment footage through green and blue filters, and some lazer effects to make it...I don't know..."funky." Needless to say, it was all laughably terrible. Here is a woman who literally has music "down to a science", yet it is still awful.

I am currently taking a fundamentals of music class, and I will tell you right now, I don't understand anything we are being taught. The signatures, the rhythms, the relative minors, the sharps and flats, the scales... none of it makes a lick of sense to me on a page. But while I am sitting in class confused I can think up a melody and drum pattern, write down some wierd little diagrams in the margins to help me remember it, come home, and compose it on the Music Generator in 5 minutes. What does this all mean? I'm not saying I have talent; maybe what I make on the Playstation really isn't that good, and my friends are just humoring me. What I AM trying to point out is that, in a literal sense, I don't know shit about music. I don't know about the science or the fundamentals. But I can make it. I can think it up and play it. I can listen to a pop song on the radio, figure out how to play it on guitar, and then write a better one.

I'm kind of losing track of what I'm talking about, but I will move on to my next point anyway. Talkin 'bout music!

Take my two favorite musical acts at the moment. On one hand you have Momus, a man who knows the ins and outs of music. He knows the fundamentals, the sciences, the history, the rhythms, the themes, the styles... He can compose an intricate boroque symphony on a casio keyboard, and then find a way to make it sound like (the forementioned) early-90s dance-pop. He can also play guitar like a sonovabitch. Now, look at Liars. This band makes noise. The guitarist plays chords that don't exist. The singer doesn't sing, he yells stuff. When I saw them live, the bassist took out some kind of device and "played" the same electronic note through an entire song. But Liars make music, no doubts there. I am pretty sure they don't write sheet music for each song, and they certainly don't wrack their brains over relative keys or how many sharps are in the key of C minor, but their music is good, to me anyway. Like Momus, their music is creative in its own way.

I guess the closest thing to a consistent idea in all of this is that creativity makes music, not necessarily knowledge. It's not what you know, it's what you hear in your head.