Things I’m Sick of:

• Post-modernism.
• Analysis
• Conceptual art
• Performance art
• Art invading music.
• “Professional” musicians and artists.

Now that music has become an even more profitless endeavor in our society, it’s a good time for us to reflect on WHY human beings make music.  It’s almost certainly not because they went to school for it.  It’s seldom to prove a point(and almost universally awful when it does).  The fact is, the absence of money in music could be the best thing to happen to music in my lifetime.

Human beings make music, art, film, etc. because they feel like doing it.  I’m ready for a future that has no universities churning out useless fine arts majors who bitterly generate chaotic and emotionless art like robots.  Those degrees never made anybody happy.  I’m ready for music to STOP BEING ART.  No more thought, no more analysis, no more slaving, no more work.  I’m ready for music to start being more fun, more emotional, more entertainment.  Less perfect, less respectable, and less depressing.

Music without money will be more local, more representative of our culture,  and it might start going somewhere.  To me, making money off of music was always akin to making money off of one’s children: OF COURSE your children are valuable…beyond belief.  But to sell them is absolutely profane.

On a recent trip to the Seattle Art Museum, I was extremely uncomfortable.  I couldn’t describe the feeling, but it was definitely reminiscent of  dread and guilt I felt during years of going to church as a kid.  I felt like there must be something terribly more interesting about this than it actually seems, but despite going to lengths to aggrandize what was hanging on the wall, I still found nothing about it to even like.   A woman sat quietly crying at a Gauguin video while her husband held her.  A funereal crowd of onlookers milled about and reverently listened to handheld audio devices.  No one spoke a word, not a smile in sight.

SOUNDS LIKE FUN, RIGHT?

I felt like I was the Three Stooges and the museum was Symona Boniface.  I wanted to run around smashing pies in people’s faces.  The paintings were horrendously ugly.  Dissonant color combinations, bad form, and a sketch book to prove that he wasn’t likely doing this on purpose just to the 18th century equivalent of “ironic”.

With the art and music communities stuck in such catastrophic “respect inequality” scenarios, it’s the perfect time to BE the Three Stooges.  And I think that’s just what I’ll do.

There was no real point to this post except that I felt like saying it.