The Crisis of Musical “Individuality”
Written By: Libby Hsieh
Post Date: 3/31/17
In 2017, the muddy waters of musical homogeneity are crowded with people trying to stay afloat, and succeeding under the premise that they all scream the same words. Being a musician, I, like everyone else, have spent many hours daydreaming about performing my music as a way to make a living. Every time I think about it, I want to smash my guitar like those guys in creepy metal bands like I have some predisposition against “the man,” throw my keyboard out the window like that badass old lady in Zombieland, and proclaim an existence of silence before tying my vocal chords into a knot.
Attending small house shows, performing at them, and seeing my friends play the same game, leaves me in this place of not-so-quiet contemplation concerning one word—individuality. Certainly, a shitty college apartment or an underground warehouse—with the same lo-fi static, cut off jeans, apathetic eye rolls, and “Add us on SoundCloud!”—are places where you will find very tiny amounts of it. I don’t care how underground and experimental you think it is. It’s not.
As an influx of musicians scheme their way through exclusive DIY communities, it’s hard to distinguish true creativity. Everything becomes a bland, hackneyed line of formulaic music. Music communities originally formed on the intent of wild expression have become a basic need for musicians to receive populist validation.
It’s all overproduction. It has deformed authenticity and rugged individualism into a plastic model of what people want to listen to. Because we’re lazy.
Musicians (some, not all) know what they want to play because they know what other people want to hear. Sure, you can play guitar. Sure, you have a stellar set of pipes—but where is the creativity? Anyone can play three noisy chords. Anyone can listen to a vocal riff and copy it without a hitch.
Likewise, in the form of other genres, anyone can read an inspiring lyric and write something that mirrors it. But where is the authenticity in that? How can being a ‘creative’ be authentic when every person’s music is a derivative of something that has been done thousands of times before? You can’t keep recycling old ideas and passing them off as individuality. Everyone else is doing that. This pseudo-individuality is overdone and frankly, it’s boring.
In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,“ David Foster Wallace proposes that the next literary, or artistic, era is going to be littered with “anti-rebels,” who “treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.” He goes on to say, “These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed…Real Rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘How banal.’”
But what happens when we have started producing mass sincerity, individuality, or experimentalism in order to gain a profit to the point where “sincerity” and “individualism” are things that are as common as traffic on the 405 at 3 p.m.? People like relatable artists. People like realness. What happens when realness isn’t real anymore? Sincerity has become the standard for music and has done people’s thinking for them. It makes people forget that what they are listening to is wholly intended for them and is predigested rather than a true reflection of the artist. It becomes no more than a means to an end. Why can’t sentimentality be the end?
Trying to be wholly authentic, wholly emotional, or wholly “individual” seems like it’s an effort to rally against the status quo. However, as every musician gets the wise idea of rebellion, they become a humdrum cliche. I was having this conversation with a good friend of mine and he said that for music to be considered “good,” and non-cliche essentially, it has to have a quality of inspiration and a knack for drawing people in—emotionally and also with outstanding musicianship. But in a culture where every person is producing similarity and wiping out originality, how do we differentiate between what is genuine and what is solely trying to make a profit or appeal to a larger audience?
Many of those artists, who have tried to write music solely for themselves, have been perfectly molded into these stereotypes, against all their efforts, simply because there are a million other musicians exactly like them. Any attempts at trying to break into the realm of inspiration to others is impossible when the credibility of uniqueness has become nullified. People are so used to hearing “rawness” and “realness” that their ears are used to it. They have become tuned to this song of predigested overstimulation.
Sure, you can say that this idea is elitist and only appeals to avant garde music and classical pieces—music that plays to the unreached imagination and successfully fulfills the emotional human need. But it’s not. It’s not necessarily about writing something strange. You can’t create new instruments. You can’t create new sounds.
In the current climate of political intensity, authenticity is no longer enough. Individualism is only of service to those creating it. Getting people to move is what we need. So maybe our place in the musical realm isn’t solely to be ourselves and create new things. Instead, we should pander to this collective idea—in a real positive way. In a way that incites action and creates change in a place where people often feel misguided and marginalized.
