Music is more than the Beat

I am not a musician; I don't even read music, but it is my favorite of the Arts. The very idea that humans can communicate thoughts and feelings just by making sounds, by disturbing the patterns of the air, by vibrating molecules in precise ways, is astounding. Music is the most ethereal of the Arts. It produces nothing tangible, nothing you can see. The vibrations are there one instant and gone the next, yet those vibrations can be profoundly moving.

I do not care what kind of music it is, classic, folk, country, jazz, pop, blues, rock. It is all great.owever (I am sure you knew a however was coming along), we are currently being deluged with what is labeled as music, but is, in fact, noise. Music, by my definition and by the definition of many others, requires a beat and a melody.

Now, I am fairly loose about what I consider melody; some of the jazz and rock I love is fairly odd, but, in those pieces, I can always detect some theme, some flow, that coalesces into a melody, however odd it may be.

There are 2 genres however that seemingly just do not understand that there must be something besides a pounding beat. I speak, of course, of hip hop, or rap, or whatever it currently is called, and extreme metal (speed metal, death metal, black metal, again, I have trouble keeping up with their ever changing names)

Hip hop, sounds to me like the simple rhyming games we played as kids. Most, is just a beat, with some electronic squeaks and squeals. The beat, when you strip away the surrounding noise, is about as complex as the rhythms I heard when I was a child, as girls chanted while they jumped rope. The only difference is the words; the little girls I heard never just chanted a range of obscenities. To hear those half bright thugs referred to as hip hop 'artists' is nauseating, an insult to the entire, long tradition of art.

Just as bad, maybe worse, are the purveyors of metal.  What they play is nothing but rhythm played as fast as possible at ear splitting volume. I have no problem with volume; I grew up on Hendrix and a myriad of other musicians who understood the volume could be used to create different sounds and they used those sounds  in the context of the music they made. They used them rhythmically and melodically. I do not hear that in today's metal. Instead, on the rare occasions I have tried to listen, that I just feel assaulted, sonically raped. Maybe that is the idea. I have heard that those bands are trying to shock their audience into some kind of altered awareness. I have trouble buying that but, maybe. If so, that need to change tactics because all they will create with what they are playing are a bunch of half deaf, brain dead, little zombies. The reason I say that these guys may be worse than the hip hop guys is that many metal players actually can play; here and there a passage escapes them that actually resembles music before it is swept away by the roar of screeching electronics. These guys are potentially talented and capable of creating something musical and to throw away talent is a far greater sin that not having it and just trying to make a buck, like the hip hop producers.

There. I have that out of my system and I feel better. I promise I will not go off on a rant like that again, well, not for a little while, Next time, something positive, I promise.