The View From 52nd Street
By Arthur Mullen

“Honesty,” as Billy Joel continues to sing famously o­n myriad classic rock stations, “is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue.” The line rang true in 1978 when it was written and it still does today. True, commercialization and target markets have created acute genres and nomenclatures in which creativity takes a back seat. Yes, the name of this ride is capitalism, open markets, consolidation of ownership; but the drive was not begun yesterday. Music was industry even before Elvis Presley left Sun Records to selfishly exploit black innovations. Exponential increases in exploitation in the world of today sound fresh alarms that shake up o­nly those who’ve been sleeping, or have turned a deaf ear to the sad song of music and money’s marriage throughout modern Western history. Smart musicians, savvy audiences, and believe it, those with good taste are not so distressed by the reality of commercial music pre–packaged for target audiences; music molded for a specific demographic. Nor do these pure products signal the end of some mythical Age of Creativity (that never really happened; remember, the Beatles were a boy band). Mass-produced and mass-marketed music has long been reality in the world of the masses; its progressive impulses have begotten not necessarily a void of creativity, but merely a culture of popular music that, if graphed o­n a timeline of the past century, would be a graveyard of bourgeois trends and arcs, which, like communism, have been kicked to the side of the road because they no longer sell. That’s Western culture. Not honest or real as art.

Movements of sound o­n this graph are forced, by the gravity of money, from the outskirts of mass society towards its center. Original sound from people who care is real music, and it does exist, however marginalized by the machine of industry, and however many times exploited. For recent times, let us cite the example of what happened in the transition between the 80s and 90s, when the sounds of (then) unknown groups Beat Happening and Nirvana were seized upon by the recording industry, and music began to be marketed in the new genres indie and alternative (respectively). The existence of such lewd categories, and the obsession of the recording industry to create them, to manufacture trends, to push bands that sound alike, and draw lines around everyone, artist and audience alike, really o­nly affect those who’re tuned in. It may be fact that the individual who appreciates music as pure sounds, or who creates music as pet sounds, is rare. But the potential to appreciate/create the honesty and realness of music is intrinsic to human nature. We all have it. Because of technological progress many of us also have access to the sounds of music from an ever-growing source, the internet. In this culture the responsibility for good taste rests o­n the individual, who faces yes, an evil empire in the recording industry, but with the freeing powers of honesty and individuality in hand, does not do so with fear, nor longing for a communist world of communal good taste, which is historically non-existent. “Honesty is hardly ever heard, and mostly what I need from you.”

To read more of Arthur Mullen's writing visit his blog at www.3rdarm.biz.

Other articles by Arthur Mullen.

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