Whether or not you happen to like 'electronic music' may depend upon how it's presented to you. The term 'electronic music' is not a particularly descriptive one, and in the sense that it only hints at sound dominated by push-buttoned, point-click-and-dragged, machine-generated digital blips and bleeps, it certainly doesn't define a genre with any specificity whatsoever. Yet at face value, the term 'electronic music' evokes a soundscape that is quite hollow, lacking in emotion, elusive, inaccessible, hardly human, and barely worthy of a designation as true 'music.' In these terms, 'electronic music' is painted in stark contrast to the blood, sweat, heartache, ecstasy, and exuberance expressed through music strummed, drummed, fingered, blown, slapped, and plucked by musicians across the genres of rock, pop, soul, r&b, funk, jazz, reggae, blues, etc., over the decades. If electronic music were compared to non-electronically based music, it would personify the Zombie Apocalypse to non-electronically based music's passionate Latin, Italian, or French Lover.
Well, I'm here to remind you that music appreciation is truly subjective. What I may love, you or someone else may find throughly annoying, non-melodic, distasteful, disturbing, or unlistenable. Perhaps all of the above. And this doesn't just apply to electronic music. It certainly frames the chatter around all musical genres, including all the non-electronically-based ones I just mentioned.
My point here is, 'electronic music' has just as much complexity, if not more, when compared with the non-electronically-based genres that have gone before it. And in truth, 'electronic music' has been with us since at least the 1960s. For those of us scoring at home, that's 45+ years. 'Electronic Music' has been incorporated quite completely into many non-electronically based genres ever since, with some stunning and magical results. I'll spare the examples here, but let's just say it's run the gamut from rock to jazz to soul to r&b to reggae and beyond, and has helped define countless sub-genres of music, from prog rock to jazz-fusion to dub, and on and on...
As a first blogpost here at MusicVibe365, I wanted to get these thoughts out here on the inter webs. Rather than choosing sides in the electronic/digital vs. non-electronic/analog debate, I embrace both. In fact, the two are so intertwined in 2013 across endless genres and sub-genres of music, so much so that it's almost impossible to separate the electronic and non-electronic elements. After all, electric guitars, wah-wah pedals, and Moog synthesizers were once anathema in some music purist circles. Imagining music without these elements would be to wipe out more than a half century of amazing art. Gladly, that's an impossibility.
So without further ado, welcome to the launch of the, like eight-hundred-and-seventy-seven-thousand, five-hundred-and-ninety-ninth Music Blog. We're certainly not the first, maybe not the most prestigious, and if you can find any superlative to define MusicVibe365 at its tender age of ONE post, then well, you're a real swell fella and/or a sweet dame.
And now, on to all things Electronic, Non-Electronic, and Everything In-Between...
--J.T., Stardate 9.04.2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdjL8WXjlGI
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