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Since this is the thread for unpopular opinions, I won't hold back about electronica and club music.
As computers and software keep increasing their foothold and further permeate every aspect of music-making, our global music and DJ culture has steadily been regressing to a state which ultimately is leading our collective asses to some form of idiocracy for supporting it unconditionally.
From the lack of compositional skills, inability to write memorable melodies to total disregard for the basics of arrangement and any innovative ideas or deeper message on the side of the music makers, the public itself has sunk to ever-lower depths of expectations, having now been trained and conditioned to accept those dumbed-down and inferior productions as the standard. There are now audiences who would not know what to do if someone was going to actually play a song with vocals, a proper melodic buildup and was played with real instruments by human beings.
That same public, however reacts extremely well to people going on stage wearing giant masks or other gimmick props (to be fair, Kiss was way ahead of the curve with this one) while presenting simplistic tracks laden with special efx and synchronized to pyrotechnics, cheap thrills that are nonetheless a guarantee to get a rise out of them for a few seconds.
Thousands of years of humans patiently crafting the most exquisite music being made irrelevant by terabytes of beat-matched sample libraries and intelligent software agents turning it all into one gigantic highway lined with perfect samey-looking cars forever. And leaving real musicians completely out of work as no one wants to hire them.
Now of course, it would be unfair to forget the reality that most of this music I am ranting about is in fact designed to be consumed by people under the influence of chemicals, and that the aim of it is to clearly provide a smooth, predictable and appropriately themed endless backdrop to enhance their drug experience without ever 'rocking the boat' or waking them up from their torpor by causing them to think, other than to occasionally tweet about it (in 140 characters or less) or annoy everyone around them by snapping pictures with their new iPhone 4Gs.
Mike Judge arguably was a visionary, and as is the case with most of them had his disruptive movie Idiocracy buried by Fox (who funded it) when it became obvious how incredibly prescient its message was, and that it was hitting a bit too close to home for comfort. This is pretty much what seems to have been happening to the once-lavish, exotic and gorgeously iconoclastic world of dance music.
It all became streamlined, commoditized and defanged into a parody of its once-vibrant sexiness and beautiful energy; but with lots more bass, sharper drum sounds and wondrous synthetizer wooshes than ever before.
That's where young sonic rebels like Skrillex (who everyone loves to hate) can come in and wake people the f*ck up from that complacent status quo with gut-wrenching ugly-ass beats and demented bass lines. The world might just be getting ready for the next generation of electronic punks without guitars.
P.S.: before anyone even points it out, yes there are thousands of very able and extremely talented musicians, composers and practitioners of creative electronic music today, but they aren't very high on the public's radar, and for the most part what they do just doesn't seem to register at all.
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My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.
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