Introduction
Radical Music changes the way an audience perceives music. It is work that takes on the baggage of history, subconsciously or consciously, and uses it to its advantage to create something that is a beacon for the present and the future. It rejects the dogma of nostalgia in favor of a reorganization of ideas to better fit the artist's expression. It looks to use its prior knowledge to create music that is pure and authentic. The effects of this cause a ripple that is everlasting. It influences others to pick up instruments, to start bands, and to make music that gives the same feeling they had when they first heard Radical Music. Radical Music describes the strong historical interplay between generations of musicians that have shaped and changed how we perceive and play music. It is Bob Dylan first hearing Woody Gutherie, The Stones first hearing Muddy Waters, and countless bands first being shocked by Sabbath. It is the material result of emotional expression, the material result of philosophies, the true synthesis of a person's influences. It's a Coltrane solo inspiring many musicians to decide what is to happen next, its Charlie Patton visiting plantations to spark the beginning of the blues. It is in the moment of that existential shock that the lineage continues. When you're confronted with music that destroys prior understandings of what it means to make music you are forced to reconsider. This is the work of the Radical Musician. To discover something in themselves or in history that has been put to the side, turn it up louder and display it for the audience to see.
It's something that lacks in a society content to dull down every aspect of its art making. It left a gap that is felt in all corners of art. Why are there no new stylists? The question goes unanswered due to an unwillingness to face and to study what truly makes Radical Music radical. There's always an urge to imitate rather than consume and then reconfigure. There's an ignorance to the process of what makes Radical Art radical. The history of Radical Music is true creativity. This is finding and dissecting what makes a piece work, and then synthesizing it in your own work. De Kooning understood the work of Rubens, understood how Rubens painted the flesh, and incorporated that into his own work, in a completely unique and stylized way. Everything will be the same until this process is taken up again. It is the job of the Radical Artist to continue this process. Without this historical understanding we are doomed to constantly “invent” everything again for the first time.
Radical Music is inherently anti-capital. It has always stood on the outside of what is profitable, then to be later consumed by the thing it was against. Once a form of music is taken into an institution it becomes a bastardization of itself (with very few exceptions). In these environments creativity is discouraged, and the historical importance of the radical nature of the music is turned into trivial facts. A trailblazing giant like Ornette Coleman is turned into a footnote of jazz history. The nature of the modern musical institution, like all other institutions, is to produce a profit. It is not in its interest to promote music that alters this. Radical Music has always threatened the nature of this. Because it is so threatening, the institution looks to imitate, then regurgitate a stale copy. It is only with an understanding of this that we can go and teach future Radical Musicians of how to avoid this dilemma and how to further the long standing tradition of making music that challenges, that confronts, and that shifts culture.
Confrontation, The Audience, and Capital
When the musician ventures into stylism and restructualism, they are beginning on a path to making confrontational art. The artist is open to confronting the music of their past and the expectations it holds, to confront the modern era and challenge the ideas of what that particular genre, style, or process of music really means. By deriving truth from the music the artist sets themselves up for a possible violent interaction in the audience. Since audiences throughout the history of music have been taught to expect something that entertains, a musician who challenges expectation will always catch some heat. If a musician does not do this, they are not really doing their job as a practitioner of Radical Music. The relationship between the audience and the musician in this art form is essential to both sides. The musicians need the audience to have their ideas heard and thought about, the audience needs the musician to present new ideas to help them recontextualize their relationship to music. This ideal relationship is not what happens. Usually the audience has more power over the musician. Mostly unintentional, there is an expected need to be entertained or, even if they are looking for a “different” experience, it is expected that they are not challenged. There is also the invisible influence of capital. Some of the music that was most shocking easily lost its bite when pushed to create profit and appease the audience. This is a process that has killed almost all creative moments of the last 100 years. All Radical Musics are de-evolved to fit into a regulated, marketable space, to sell to a bigger, less curious audience. Here the ideal positive relationship between the two is instead negative, leading to the creative energy being sucked from the musician and the audience is left feeling lost and nostalgic, wondering where the magic has gone in the artist. There is no room for the musician to present what they believe is true but instead, succumb to what is accepted as truth. The two way relationship here is dead. If audiences are not challenged, are not confronted with the truth then they begin to be placid in their thinking, and music gets worse because of it. The musician is forced to sell and become a bastardization of what they once believed in, they no longer make art radically but instead produce a product. There is fault on the musician as well. We music makers have become implicit in producing work that is lazy. This is the fault of advertising, which led to the false idea that being a musician is inherently an identity. This corroded music, leading to music that is based on how you look to the audience versus what you are performing. Much like in visual art the conceptualization of what a piece means and who the person making the piece is has warped what art could and should be. Modern music became something that never challenges the current state of the world, through a careful weaving out of all the music that once challenged it. All the Music’s have been turned into products to be bought and sold in a safe way for the consumer.
Here is an example: to musicians in the late 50s what Jazz was becoming, was very different from what the audience expected. What it meant to Ornettee Coleman did not coincide with audiences and especially critics. What Ornette was doing went over their heads due to this broken relationship. There's a failure to meet the musician where he is and critique from there. Instead he was hit with illogical claims that did not respond to the basis of what his work meant. If the relationship was mended, the audience could have been more informed and came to his music with a deeper understanding. This is of course a process. Art that is challenging is first met with some resistance but it is the job of both the audience and the musician to be informed about what they are partaking with. What I'm suggesting is a better way audience relationships are taught to young listeners, to better uphold the relationship with the performer.
Using Ornette as an example we can see why the audience is craving this education. We live in a fairly ahistorical world, one that is not only against looking back and being informed about the past but one that is especially against extracting interpretations from it. The Radical Musician is someone who is willing to look to the past to see if there was something that was missed. For Ornette, he saw that in Jazz there was something happening with harmony and melody that was a lot more fluid, not something that was strict and rigid. He saw that inflection and approach to a given tune is as important as the any other element. Instead of succumbing to said rigidness of some of his contemporaries, he looked to expand on what that relationship between harmony and melody really meant. This led to the confrontation previously mentioned. Ornette's interpretation of this was unrecognizable to the layman. They couldn't understand it due to a detachment from the history of the art form and their unwillingness to listen and see where he was coming from. The ones who did see what he was getting after eventually became either stylists in Ornette's style or restructuralists of their own. In this way and many others, he's an essential Radical Musician. He daringly believed in the truth he saw in his music regardless of the outside pressures to stay in a mode, like traditionalism, he was uncomfortable with.
The laziness of most musicians nowadays has led to a crisis in art. The lack of historical awareness and the clinging to identity has led to very selfish art making. With no vision of the past, there is no vision of our future. If a musician is unaware of the past but is obsessed with the presentation of their perception it causes them to believe that they have invented something they have not. They start to believe that the music they present to the world is the first time it will be heard. This is always not the case. If a musician denies themselves the duty of being a student of their art form they are setting themselves up to only absorb music through cultural means. Without a personal relationship to previous musicians' works, the artist is doomed to only repeat what has come before them. Impactful music becomes absorbed in culture usually through a bastardization of it. The music of someone like Chuck Berry was at first shocking and radical. Through many copies it has become ingrained in music and we can hear examples of his finger prints all over music. To someone who approaches music in a casual manner, they may not understand where Rock N Roll even stems from. They then look to make rock music without this awareness. It is in very rare cases that without a historical awareness, their music isn't placid, easily consumable, and perpetuating bland stereotypes of what that music is. To the person who garners a personal relationship with Chuck's music, they are more likely to take things that can still be new and challenging to the modern listener. By denying ourselves a personal relationship with history we are continually killing the tradition of Radical Music. We should think of the Radical Musician as somewhat of a historian. Someone who is willing to document but still offers perspective. Most modern music is something that could be played in an elevator without any objections. It is only there to reinforce ideas that are safe for society to consume. The counter cultural weight to music is almost a joke now. You get music like “YUNGBLOOD” that puts an emphasis on the performer's aesthetics but simply makes songs for masses to consume via Reels, TikToks, and Posts. Since the musician is ahistorical, the world is dumb, unchallenged, and lazy. There are also those who believe they are creating new music through combining genres. This has always been something of an inauthentic way to make music. Typically these musicians never bother to really appreciate some of the work they are pulling from. They instead take the idea of the art and throw it in with an idea of another. There is an embracement of the hypothetical and not the music itself. The lack of personality becomes disrespectful to whatever they are pulling from and just leads to an almost offensive end result, one that's as jumbled as a “quirky” tumblr moodboard. It's an erratic piece of ugly wallpaper and nothing more. Music like this is easier for the people who profit off of music who do not make music. There are no gambles because there is no need for it. The consumer is happy to consume what makes them comfortable, what makes them ignore, with an ugly bland smile, what is a deteriorating society. I am hesitant to make political ties to music because the implications are a lot more complex than what is usually made of it. But, without Chuck Berry's sound not only would we never have Rock N Roll but I'm not sure the world would be a similar place. He shocked white Americans, and changed the way not only the country but the world heard things. This is the weight that Radical Music can hold in the world and it is something that is blatantly missing in art and culture because the musician is indoctrinated to be unlearned and the audience is complacent to never be challenged. Chuck did not make political art but his art was made in a new and radical manner. Combined with being a black man many white kids idolized, the music itself was powerful and shaped the future.
The Modern Radical Musician
To avoid being a perpetuator of our culture's obsession with nihilism I will now offer up some solutions to how to avoid the lethargy of a modern musician. It is essential to be able to understand and engage with the music you enjoy. This starts by having a deep understanding of the musician's discography. By listening to a whole discography we can truly value artistic progression (or regression) why it happens and why it's important to us. If you just consistently listen to one record by an artist and know no background, it misses the big picture of who that artist is, where they are coming from creatively, and how they have gotten there. Even with just engaging with one discography, we will be able to compare to others and understand that artist's wider influence. This leads us to the next strategy we can deploy which is comparison. The great history of Radical Music has left us with constant renditions of one song, or one idea. If one bluesman is able to interpret a song one way, chances are there are countless others who have done it a different way. By comparing these two renditions you can extrapolate what makes them both interesting or uninteresting. This also gives a better understanding of artistic approach and helps our own music by seeing different techniques being deployed over just one tune. It highlights each musician's individuality and their unique idiosyncrasies. It is important to not engage with this process passively. There is a benefit to both active and passive listening, and I have gained important artistic lessons from both. But, without the process of asking hard questions after the activity of listening this would be rendered useless. Instead of asking if we like a piece of music and leaving it at that we should understand why we don't find it interesting. Why do we not find it interesting compared to others? Is this piece of music speaking to me? If not, why not? If yes then why? These are essential questions every musician has asked throughout time. It is important to also hold ourselves to giving an authentic answer. One of the most prevalent questions in today's identity obsessed culture is: Do we like this music because it makes me look a certain way to others? While this may sound harsh, or even rudimentary it is very common since musicians are obsessed with being chic. This phenomena is a result of art becoming a need to push capital and for it to always represent the product . It is the result of people like Andy Warhol pushing image over deep artistic understanding. Making the representation of something hold more cultural value then the thing itself. Warhol is his art but his art outside of himself means little, such is the aim for the modern artist. Because of the imitation of this in most artists, the process of self reflection in art is essential to separate what we enjoy and how we may be perceived, it is a real 21st century issue. Once these questions are asked we can better attempt to extract what we really enjoy from a given artist. For example, one of the reasons The Rolling Stones are so endlessly fascinating to me is the interplay between the rhythm guitar and the drums. Both Charlie Watts and Keith Richards are masters at interacting with the music and supplying it with what they need. On “Miss You” there is a particular part on the first chorus where Keith plays quarter notes with the bass drum to push the beat and drive the music more. This never reoccurs in the song. Being able to identify a particular moment in a song or a particular skill an artist helps us extract it to put it into our own music. This particular moment made me realize in my own bass playing I can throw off or accentuate the pulse of a given moment by putting more emphasis in my right hand. It is also essential we engage with any music with an understanding of the process that musicians deploys themselves. Not only can we understand better where the musician is coming from but also how we can deploy it in our own music. In the case of Keith, an interview explained the technique he uses with his right hand. This helped me better understand how I could put this in my own work. By saying we just enjoy a piece of work or find it interesting we lose out on all that I previously mentioned. With specificity and understanding we can better enjoy the music and make our own music more dense. All of these previous examples all come from an understanding of people I admire. Musicians are historians and should act as such. We should understand our influences to better understand music as a whole. Without this we are doomed to be in a cultural war zone, where we hurl baseless critiques of art we don't understand out of a willful ignorance. Music is not over, Art is not dead, it is only required that we shake off our learned hopelessness and put the work in to make Art and as extension the world more interesting and less awful.
Instead of being beholden to the need to create content in a wholly new and tortuous digital landscape Radical Musicians should seek to get back to what music really is. They should seek to truly make sound with intent and look to garner aesthetic experiences. In modern culture the obsession of the presentation has shifted music from being an art of sound to an art of marketing and creation of personality. The obsession of Rock Star has bled into every facet of the music making culture, rendering all music to be a side product of the person it is representing. Every modern pop star brags that to them music is just one part of a “bigger picture” to them, highlighting that music is not as serious as their life to them. The solution to this is to avoid the idea of a career, avoid the idea of being a star. A career should be a term that is used in the past tense not in the current. You should not care for your career, you should make decisions based on artistic intuition. They should only give a shit who you are when it's proven your work means something. The career has nothing to do with music and is only tied up with the modern aspirations of what success is. Success to a Radical Musician should be to create music that fits in with what their understanding of history is, and what their aspirations for what music can be are. If they have done that they have become successful, there is no other barometer. The obsession of being cool has really only ever become so prevalent in the dawn of the media age. There was always the desire to have others look at you fondly, but never before has there been a time where the artist must create content, not art. The Radical Musician can curve this obsession with a quiet and honest dedication to their own work and the study of what they love. This is a simple task that goes a long way. In this same vain promotion should also be looked upon as a necessary but simple thing. In the modern era promotion has replaced music making as the primary source of effort, due to the need for the market to be fed content. Much like in the 50s, advertising is unavoidable. What can be avoided is unnecessary content. The Radical Musician wants the audience to hear their work because they believe that is important, not because they need to feel gratified or to be popular. Radical Music has always been made in DIY settings because there is a necessity to have things be said. In an environment that is mostly devoid of the need to produce capital, the Musician is free to create freely from the desire to be appealable. This creates much more honest work. Since the internet has disintegrated the definition of what it means to be DIY, it is best to avoid indulging in the content producing circles of the internet all together. It can only ever taint the process and offers you very little good. The good that can be found is getting in touch with like minded musicians and promoting the music you believe to be powerful. Any other content that is produced to create an identity should be avoided. For it is in this act that the musicians become career obsessed, and dilutes their art for content and capital.
Conclusion
In a world where music is made only for stimulation and not for reflection, truth, or philosophies, it is in the duty of the Radical Musician to deploy their principles in their work. It is our job to try and teach the generations after ours to develop a deep and historical understanding of what has came before them, so that they can develop a style that is unique. We as musicians are doing ourselves and everyone around us a disservice when we abuse the art form in favor of comfort and of ease. It makes everything worse if we do not ask harder questions and choose to have our hand in the pot of slop that has been given to us. We must resist institutional support when it is in the institutions best interest to dilute the work for their shareholders. Music has strength when it is made in a serious way, and pursued with rigor. It is a waste of everyones time if it is treated otherwise. What made my life worth living was hearing music that shattered my reality, and built it back up again. If we are complacent in producing shit work, how can we expect to make art worthwhile for the people after us? It has been reduced to nothing but signifiers in the hyperreal. It is our job to transcend that crisis and provide the much needed alternative.
