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caveat lector: i never liked rush. i tired, i really did...
and i think peart is at best only partially correct in blaming drummers for such problems as he sees.
rock doesnt really give you much room to do interesting things
ba doom chuck/ba doom doom chuck....
the drummer is straightjacketed
ba doom chuck/ba doom doom chuck
i like to blame commercial radio
[[small break of your choice]]
if i was to be faithful to the form, i would paste the above over and over.
after 4 minutes, it'd stop.
this drumming business opens onto some complicated questions, i think: for example the main difference between the period during which cream was playing and now is that earlier the genre rules that dictated what musicians could and could not do if they work within a given form were less strictly defined.
a subset of the above: pop song form is not about development. it is about statement and variation (verse, bridge, chorus: lather, rinse, repeat)....if you do extended versions live, say, of pieces built around this logic, it means that the structure is rigid and the players are reduced to soloists whose function it is to provide ornamentation. personally, i find few things more tedious than running chord changes. i do not see why it is interesting--no, that's not right--i do not see why one, very particular way of interacting with harmonic structures is now taken to be the only way to interact with it.
i blame commercial radio. people want what they already know. they are not interested in new things unless they are told new things are out there. in the states, the vehicle for such information was commercial radio, which has been slowly strangled since the middle 1970s by marketing-driven format changes. phenomena like mtv only extend this older logic--it popularized the video, but invented almost nothing in terms of marketing ideas.
and in the states, a place in general characterized by fear and contempt of the arts, there is almost nothing available in terms of alternative funding, so if you want to play music and make a living, you have to submit to commerical strictures.
that doesnt mean that all musicians in the states do this: but most folk do not know about these players because they get no exposure to speak of.
and this is why, in general, interesting new music is accessed through very local lilve scenes. which have no filters, so lots of folk participate in them--so the quality varies wildly. but there we are. this is also why i totally oppose the riaa and its position on file sharing: i would like almost nothing better than to see the majors collapse and pull down this entire restrictive, tedious way of domesticating music along with them.
cream did not operate in the same context and so wasn't bound by the same rules --so even though they took blues forms as points of departure----once they would jump out of the form, all elements would develop simultaneously--which opens up space for more extended kinds of work, both as a collective and as a collective 2 parts of which are laying out for a "drum solo"---but even cream encountered this same problem: they too would often appear to be simply wandering around because a rigid structure remained the referencepoint, and development was subordinated to structure.
ba doom chuck/ba doom doom chuck
i think that music is about development, not statements. things should move from place to place, and that movement should be clear. i dont think, against what vanblah said above, that this assumes you imagine yourself to be a "musical genius"--whatever that means--it is more a matter of approach. and it is not about length, either: anton webern's pieces are often under 2 minutes, but they move move move (for example).
what an emphasis on development requires is a closer engagement on the part of the listener.
all this requires is exposure to a different type of musical game: how you listen is a function of what you know about--listening can be trained and retrained and retrained. that is part of the beauty of it. it is not a rigid capability, even though it is treated as if it was.
most of the folk i talk to about music are, one way or another, bored bored bored with much of the contemporary scene, particularly in its comercial variant. bands get signed because they sound enough like other bands to be marketed easily but different enough that the are distinguishable one from another.
there are lots of other types of music than rock/pop, many of which have really great players doing very interesting, very demanding stuff. rawk is a tiny domain. if it suffocates, this will be a function of how the form is marketed first, but more a function of the degree to which audiences and musicians alike submit to this, think within these frames, and assume that there really is but one best way to make music.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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