{"id":2424,"date":"2012-07-10T06:40:17","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T10:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/?p=2424"},"modified":"2012-07-10T06:48:22","modified_gmt":"2012-07-10T10:48:22","slug":"fuzzy-guitars-and-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/2012\/07\/fuzzy-guitars-and-rage\/","title":{"rendered":"Fuzzy guitars and rage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of the people at my new job, which I’m going to call SmallAgency because we are, have vastly different taste in music than I do. Some of that is because I pretty much checked out of new music in the mid-1990s. Grunge wasn’t what I was interested in when it was current for a lot of reasons not the least of which was that it sounded way too punk for me.<\/p>\n

Until recently I couldn’t articulate why I didn’t like punk music. I like loud. Anyone who grew up listening to any flavor of heavy metal likes loud. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t appreciate raging against the system because with systems as screwed up as the ones we’ve invented for ourselves we really only have two choices: fight or be crushed. My poor sleep-deprived brain finally churned up something interesting yesterday, though, and when I thought about it afterward it, like all revelations, seemed totally obvious.<\/p>\n

I don’t like punk music for the same reason I don’t think Jackson Pollock <\/a>is art: it’s something I could easily do.<\/p>\n

Pretty much any endeavor, whether it be painting, writing, music, building furniture, can be made to look effortless by someone either talented enough or skilled and practiced enough in a given area. There is a reason why the axiom “practice makes perfect” exists. Temper that knowledge that anything can be made to look easy if done by a skilled enough practitioner with the knowledge that it really does take more than money to get to the Met<\/a> and things I can’t do, like play music, appear exceedingly hard.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
“Convergence” by Jackson Pollock. Just because a monkey throws poo at a wall and it makes a pattern doesn’t make it art.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To me punk music is the sonic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. There are no discernible notes or melody and at least two of the identified originators of the genre, The Ramones<\/a> and The Sex Pistols<\/a> have been quoted as taking pride in the fact that they couldn’t actually play their instruments when they started.<\/p>\n

The thing is, I don’t like rap\/hip-hop either, but it’s not something I could do. All that rhyming, and in better examples from the genre cleverness, take skills I don’t have. Skills I don’t have garner my respect. After all, if you can’t do it better, do you have a right to criticize? It’s the “how hard can that be?” mentality; if I can do it, so can anyone. Which leads me to this: if punk is something seemingly any idiot who picks up a guitar can do, theoretically even me with no musical talent, then how can I respect punk musicians?<\/p>\n

This probably says more about how I value my own talents than it does about music or the place of creative achievement in the world. All I know is, Frank Zappa managed to make fuzzy guitars and rage sound like music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of the people at my new job, which I’m going to call SmallAgency because we are, have vastly different taste in music than I do. Some of that is because I pretty much checked out of new music in the mid-1990s. Grunge wasn’t what I was interested in when it was current for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-thoughts","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2424"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2427,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions\/2427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}