Art by Mariana Crottollini (Argentina)
The music of the future will be terribly boring. Unless there is a revolution…
By Guillermo Cides
Music, like other arts, has always been characterized by the emergence of artists who, in one way or another, dared to recreate it with new, risky, and avant-garde concepts, going beyond the cultural and social limits of their times.
This requires an anarchic and challenging creation environment; new and revolutionary things do not grow in comfort.
Any look back in time from a sociological perspective can demonstrate this. It is necessary for artists to go crazy and risk formats that are not commercial, and after all that initial broth, a musical culture is finally forged that represents that period.
Forget, then, all this I just said: social networks and the “new status system” based on likes, together with patronage systems or “donations for the next album”, make musicians lose the audacity to search with the mere objective of pleasing their future followers.
The music of the coming years—and much of what is already heard—is condescending.
While technology allows us to create music three times faster and easier than years ago, the public has not yet realized that they should demand three times more quality. Far, very far from provoking, the music has become restaurant music. And I don’t mean where you play, but WHAT you play. The “social network musician” needs to be part of a virtual popular festival that has taken away the chance of daring and rebellion. Music is gradually transformed into an element of artificial consumption that, far from its origin, no longer invites introspection, the necessary social disagreement, or the obligatory role of the questioning artist. You don’t have to be a politician to change a society; music and art in general can too. But as in all demagoguery, musicians also become conservatives by adjusting their chords to a dubious general taste. The curious thing is that the idols of those same musicians preached just the opposite and were the result of musical searches and incessant tests of style. And although show business is only a responsible part of this, it is fundamentally the musicians who settled on the couches to make music.
The music of the future will be terribly boring. Unless there is a revolution that changes the paradigm of the musical world and the way it is shared, musicians will be part of a “forgettable chain of events” without fulfilling the most precious and simple objective of music: modifying others.
Perhaps it is convenient to be anonymous.
G.C.
