Oh god, I'm so tired. I'm trying to change my sleeping rhythm back to something more human, that's why I'm up this early. Well, it isn't THAT early, actually, but early enough for me, at least. It's 9 o'clock now, but I've been fighting to keep my eyes open for over an hour.
So that's why I'm here. Just to do something to keep me awake.
I was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend of mine a while ago. We talked about music and how over-produced most of it is these days. Or at least how only the commercial type gets any media exposure. My friend is an excellent musician, but unfortunately also a sort of a musical purist - he hates the mainstream and sometimes contemns popular songs without even hearing them out first. Don't get me wrong, I get his point, it's just the attitude I don't necessarily approve of.
During the last 4 years my musical taste has widened and somehow I've really taken a liking to some of the mainstream stuff. For example, I really like some songs on Katy Perry's debut album "One of the Boys". Yeah, maybe it's generic and some might call it soulless, but I like it.
Anyway, this confrontation of musical tastes naturally lead to a pretty spicy conversation. My friend said, that if a song has been made solely for money-making purposes without any real feelings, it can't be good. He meant that if e.g. a love song has been composed by a person, who hasn't experienced love, the song can not "embody" the feeling. Therefore people listening to it could not take or "feel" the song seriously. At the time I couldn't come up with any good counter-arguments, but later I did.
I think, that the feeling is not in the song - the feeling is in the person listening to it. The person who composes a song simply uses it to mirror his/her feelings, and it only fully works for the composer (the way that he/she meant it, anyway). The song itself is only a careful request to "feel this, please".
Let's try a hypothetical scenario. Say, there is a song, that is SO bad, that no one can even remotely like it. The worst song imaginable. Ever. What if that song, somehow, gets played on a small local radio station, just once. And during that one time it gets played, a teenage girl is kissing for the first time. With the song playing in the background.
I'd say it is a safe bet to claim that the song has now become special to her. She still might not "like" the song, but every time she listens to it, it gives her a certain feeling. The song has become a part of the soundtrack of her life.
For this reason, I think that it doesn't matter why or how a song is made. It still might be awesome and/or important to somebody. And because there's so many of us here, it probably is. Of course, if a songwriter wants to compose a "timeless classic", it helps to be sincere, but I'm just trying to make a point here.
Fuck it, I'm going back to sleep.
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