Well, Fourth of July weekend has come to a close. I hope you all had a fun and safe holiday, complete with American flags waving proudly from your front lawn, an unhealthy amount of hot dogs and Doritos in your bellies, and running away from your siblings chasing you with sparklers. But what really made this Fourth of July special for me was the playlist my boyfriend and I made that played all night from a speaker on the porch.
We made a really killer “classics” mix, with everything from “Hey, Ya!” by OutKast to “What I Like About You” by The Romantics. And looking out with my family and friends as the fireworks began while Bruce Springsteen sang “Dancing in the Dark,” I swear my heart skipped a few beats -- or that might’ve just been the result of a sugar-induced high from my obscenely unhealthy consumption of M&Ms. Either way, the way I felt when that music was playing, as completely lame as it sounds, was magical. There’s just so much soul in those old songs, so much heart and effort put into creating something that it ends up being timeless.
Maybe that’s why I’m having trouble with this whole EDM thing. For those of you who don’t know, that stands for electronic dance music. Wait, electronic music? Well, yeah. The songs are produced mainly using computer-synthesized beats and noises. Some of the songs do include some vocals, but those that do usually manipulate them using voice-altering programs in order to attain a certain pitch, tone, or quality that is not inherently present in the vocalist’s voice.
Apparently, a lot of people really like this kind of music. If you have social media, I’m sure you’ve seen some of the hallmarks of EDM concerts on your newsfeed; laser-beam stages and flower crowns, to name a few. But I just don’t get the craze.
First of all, I’m not really sure when something that is completely technologically synthesized earned the right to be called music. I think that kind of demeans the word, actually, mostly because music has always been created by human minds, then brought to life not from a computer, but from an instrument that took practice, time, and talent to play. And while some would argue here that the production and composition of EDM does take time to learn, I’d have to say that it just isn’t the same. Those who produce EDM didn’t, themselves, create anything; their computer did it for them. They may have arranged the noises in a certain pattern, but they themselves did not make them. There’s a beat and some whistles, and a bass drop every once in a while. Great, but so what? How many times is that fun? Maybe once or twice, but after a while you’re bound to get a migraine, or at least really hot from jumping and down in those colorful, furry boots.
If I go to a concert and I’m watching someone on stage, I want them to have earned the right to be there because they practiced the drums every day since they were eight years old, or they wrote songs while they were living out of their cars, or their voices are so powerful they bring people to tears. I want to see Freddie Mercury pouring his heart and soul into his piano keys. I want to see the music move Michael Jackson’s feet and arms in ways that us regular people never thought possible. I want to be overcome by the roar of a crowd yelling, “Woaaah, we’re halfway there,” while Bon Jovi yells back that we’re living on a prayer.
What I’m not getting is this rise in popularity of jumping around to what sounds like the same thing over and over again under the facade of spreading love or acceptance or whatever. I feel like society as a whole is just getting complacent and lazy, in many aspects, actually, but specifically in music. We’re okay with mosh-pitting to some synthetic whirrs and buzzes under the veil of spreading “love and acceptance,” but talk to anybody who went to Woodstock, and they’d be embarrassed that this is what we call making a statement, or even listening to music, for that matter. But they did have a bit of an advantage, what with Hendrix and The Who being there and all.
And that’s not to say that we don’t have any great artists around, today. If you’ve ever listened to Sam Smith’s vocal runs, you’ve probably melted a little inside. And I’m pretty sure that if you isolated Hozier’s lyrics on a page, people would think it was actually poetry. And that’s just to name a few. There are still countless musicians out there today who not only have real, genuine talent, but have worked hard on their art to get where they are. But I worry that, with the rise of technology, we’ll forget about what it means to really create something with our own hands or voices.
I’m not sitting here saying that I need everything in life to be powerful and have some deep, emotional meaning. Let me clarify that I can appreciate EDM to a certain level because, at the very least, it brings people together. But if you’re going to call it music, I’d have to disagree. If it’s music, there has to be some kind of physical effort put into it. And for me, clicking your mouse and pushing some buttons on a keyboard just isn’t going to cut it.
