Opinion: Music Industry’s Declining Artistry
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Brooke Snyder
weathervane.emu.edu
The “indie music” movement has been slowly gaining recognition among fans worldwide. This movement, which focuses on knowledge of underground bands, is well known for its members’ open disdain of mainstream music. I fully admit to being what some call an “indie snob,” meaning that I have made a conscious effort to find and listen to music that most of the people I know have never heard of. My reasoning for this, however, has nothing to do with wanting to appear cool or musically informed. Instead, my dedication to the movement stems from my opinion that mainstream music has become, in a purely artistic sense, completely shallow.
Over the past decade or two, mainstream music has ceased to be art. With various technological advances in the business of song recording, musical talent is no longer a prerequisite for success in the industry. Despite how terrible singers may sound live, their performances can be doctored for CDs, and since legitimate skill is now unnecessary, bands are marketed by their good looks. Essentially, the music industry has become a beauty contest in which the only artists are the sound technicians who make today’s attractive “musicians” sound like skilled professionals, while more talented but less attractive artists fall by the wayside and fail to attain significant popularity.
An ideal example of this bizarre phenomenon is the popular band, the Killers. All recordings of this band sound excellent, and even I will admit that I find many of their recorded songs both catchy and entertaining. It would be easy for an uninformed individual to make the mistake of believing that these people are legitimate musical artists. Unfortunately, as many who have seen this band live can attest, they do not sound anything like that in real life. The foundation of this band, and others like it, is image. Talent, which can now be technologically manufactured, becomes unimportant and falls by the wayside.
Because this art form is supposed to be based on sound rather than appearances, this shallow approach makes mainstream musicians increasingly difficult for me to respect in an artistic sense. That is not to say that none of their music is entertaining or fun. I simply mean that, for me, the product loses most of its artistic integrity. If the sound technicians are the ones doing all the work to make the songs sound good, then they should be the ones getting the credit that currently goes to the pretty faces and toned bodies we see on album covers.
As I have grown more and more frustrated with the current state of popular music, I have been drawn closer to the indie music scene. Because these artists are more underground, their music is less touched up. Essentially, what one hears on the CDs is, more often than not, extremely similar if not identical to the way the artists sound live.
When music first became an art form, it was genuine and based on real talent rather than looks. In a society where people face growing pressure to measure up to unrealistic physical standards, it seems to me that we should spend less time listening to people shallowly honored for their attractive bodies and more time paying attention to those who are sharing their God given gifts of musical ability. It does not matter if we find this in indie music, oldies tunes, or live performances, what matters is that we pay attention to legitimate talent wherever we find it. If we ignore it, we run the risk of seeing those with honest musical gifts slip into irrelevance and obscurity, only to be replaced by beautiful people completely devoid of artistic ability.
