there was a time in middle school when someone told me my singing sucked and i wasn't offended at all
i was like "ah ok" and i stopped singing for years because of that one comment
@julilyinfinite It's a shame how the most creative kids will just get talked out of something big sometimes. Like, I'll spare you the story but I'm 34 and still not playing drums, gotta fix that lol
@bobbyd0g Better late than never, I think it would be great if you can play the drums.
I only stopped back then not because the comment hurt but more so like, "Ah... maybe this isn't my thing then. I'll spare your ears" since at the time I wasn't really feeling it. To this day I still have a love/hate relationship with music but at least my vocals have improved somewhat.
@julilyinfinite Is it a love/hate relationship with the concept, the process, or the results? I hope that if making music is something you want to fully enjoy, that the path further unfolds before you. I had the honor and privilege of coaching a few friends out of "tone deafness" and both their output and enjoyment improved dramatically with only minor adjustments in a supportive social environment. All had professed it was impossible and they were just bad singers!
@bobbyd0g It's ok! No worries, take your time.
@bobbyd0g The process & the results aren't too much of an issue to me because I have a decent voice and I don't have a problem picking up on pitch. It's the concept of overall music that I'm in conflict with. It's like a language I have to decipher in another way because music can be used to lull people to absorb insidious messages. There were times I felt like throwing up to certain kinds of music if they play publicly out loud or is celebrated in social settings.
@julilyinfinite Ohh boy, that sounds like a conversation I could fall into for hours lmao… there is no communication medium with the naturally constrained, infinitely subjective, but chaotically influential power of music. I'm only just approaching the point in my life where I feel I can even trust myself to create music that is ultimately a force for social good. Many remember Sen. Paul Ryan praising Rage Against The Machine; it speaks to more than just his being out-of-touch.
@julilyinfinite And it goes deeper into the medium than political statements and subject matter; I find myself repulsed in many artistic situations where the media failed to "manipulate" me into an emotion. Most frequently I'm turned off by the use of sad music to attempt to deepen the impact of a scene in a TV show or a movie, and in the YouTube age we are absolutely swimming in poorly-crafted emotional button-pushers often intended to make some perverse, opportunistic influence
@bobbyd0g YUP! You explained it perfectly. I feel the same way. Even when my old friends would want to invite me to movie theaters and I'm like "hell no, im not in the mood to get my senses overloaded with nonsense".
@julilyinfinite I always appreciate chats with you but particularly glad you brought this up today, it's nice to know I'm not alone pursuing these critiques as an artist and how frankly traumatized experience can inform just as much as it can foreclose
@bobbyd0g Legit. Just recently when I last performed, I was in front of a decent sized crowd. If I had the same amount of people cheering for me years ago, I would have been like, "This is nice! Lots of people like me!"
Now when I look at them crowding around, I'm like, "Jeez... what's wrong with these people" and I try to tell them to make space for one another. It's in the sense where even if you amplify the volume, it doesn't make you a better performer.
@bobbyd0g Interesting. I can't really create music but I can write lyrics or hum out random melodies since that's the most I can muster. I'm useless elsewhere if I don't have someone to produce music for me. Lately, the original songs I made for myself sound very childlike & comical. I do a lot of silly things. Years ago I was insistent on making an awful mixtape with a lot of inside jokes with my friends but they just ended up as floating ideas.
@julilyinfinite I'm a decent (if rusting) performing musician who has trouble writing lyrics or even humming out random melodies. With our powers combined.... lol ;)
I will say that music feels like arcane magic even for talented performers until sufficient underlying systems are learned, and at that point it becomes a deliberate pursuit. My first instinct is to validate the "childlike" output but you can always pick up some tortured jazz chord progressions for flavor 🎵🎶
@bobbyd0g Yeah see even that I don't know anything about music theory or whatnot, I'm just an intuitive learner. Though if you need words or a melody, I can come up with something fairly quickly depending on what it is. I mostly just feel things out and see where it goes from there.
@julilyinfinite I had an attitude shift recently about music theory that made it much more approachable to me. I think I used to see it as a perfect system that would only reveal meaningful command at an advanced point where some greater concept emerged from a broad understanding. Now I see that there is no "point" -- Western theory is only one of many, also -- and that every musical feature you absorb is just another tool in your kit maybe you'll find a use for someday.
@julilyinfinite My struggle with originality is so confounding I find myself feeling compelled to write albums half-composed of partial song covers, mashups, appropriations. For many years whenever I have an original thought I'm repeatedly devastated when one chord changes in my head morphing it "back" into some familiar song I've heard. At the very least I could recognize "The Simpsons effect" -- it's all been done, you can only hope to do the same things differently!
@bobbyd0g You worded it better than I could. It gets frustrating trying to come up with concepts that haven't been done before. It's why I'm using technology more mindfully and frequently meditating by myself so there is fewer distractions. Just as you wrote earlier today the impact of cellphone screens & how they ruin your eyesight. I need to be careful about that too.
@bobbyd0g I actually expand more on this in one of my Instagram posts if you'd like to read the description here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmcdw9qrW8s/
@julilyinfinite I appreciate your willingness to observe music in a way that decomposes the works themselves as being able to convey their own purposes or to set their own context, because that intentionality is broken somewhere along the way most of the time. Accordingly, some work you characterize landed very differently for me. I'm personally in favor of sloppily produced trap music and propose we must analyze its irony culture well before characterizing any harmful messages.
@julilyinfinite [If only some coaching would improve my email communication habits!]