This has been the busiest year in musical performance since I started doing this professionally, back around 2004.
I was walking down the street last Sunday and passed two backyard shows - one featured a mariachi band, and the other, a reggae band - and a block party which had a brass band going.
For myself, my wife, and the dozens of musicians I regularly work with, the performance season in 2022 has been incredibly fruitful. This month alone, just between my wife and I, we will have performed 23 times. A friend of mine told me just today that in the last 6 days, he’s done 5 shows and he’s exhausted. To be clear, we’re all nobodies. We play music to pay the rent. Sure, we sometimes get flown someplace to work but we’re none of us playing with big, expensive brand name bands or anything.
After the last two years of crazy hard times for performing artists of all types, this has been an amazing year so far and the opportunities - for those who are willing to work, and for those who want to experience it - are abundant.
All of this is to say that live music is absolutely not dead. Maybe the only thing that’s dying is our individual ability to accept and enjoy it.
Listen, if one were to just go by talkbass sentiment alone, I couldn’t fault them for believing that good, creative music is dead and that anything created after 1965, 1979, 1991, or any other time period is garbage for any number of reasons, from bands making use of modern technology (eg: iems, backing tracks, click track) to just moving away from guitar-focused songs. This line of thought belies a certain lack of ability to think philosophically about music or view the world with an artful grace, I think.
Music has always been a forward-looking art. All of your favourite bands in recorded music history were looking ahead at what fresh art they could create and add to the canon; they weren’t looking back at what music sounded like 40 years earlier and responding to a protectionist impulse, as if they were the vanguard against the encroaching armies of unfunky behaviour. That’s the job of music critics and folks who can’t play and can only impotently decry the unstoppable evolution of art and culture. Maybe the folks who espouse these ideas are embittered because they didn’t have “the right stuff” and their pet projects couldn’t get off their feet or maybe they did and their fifteen mins have since expired. Maybe they are just upset that their favourite genre isn’t in vogue anymore.
There is an absolute boat load of music in the world, especially since the turn of the 21st century. We all have our favourite genres and groups… This is wholesome and natural and human. But as George Clinton, one of the patron saints of Funk once said, “Free your mind and your @$$ will follow.”
And if that isn’t the gospel truth, I don’t know what is.
I was walking down the street last Sunday and passed two backyard shows - one featured a mariachi band, and the other, a reggae band - and a block party which had a brass band going.
For myself, my wife, and the dozens of musicians I regularly work with, the performance season in 2022 has been incredibly fruitful. This month alone, just between my wife and I, we will have performed 23 times. A friend of mine told me just today that in the last 6 days, he’s done 5 shows and he’s exhausted. To be clear, we’re all nobodies. We play music to pay the rent. Sure, we sometimes get flown someplace to work but we’re none of us playing with big, expensive brand name bands or anything.
After the last two years of crazy hard times for performing artists of all types, this has been an amazing year so far and the opportunities - for those who are willing to work, and for those who want to experience it - are abundant.
All of this is to say that live music is absolutely not dead. Maybe the only thing that’s dying is our individual ability to accept and enjoy it.
Listen, if one were to just go by talkbass sentiment alone, I couldn’t fault them for believing that good, creative music is dead and that anything created after 1965, 1979, 1991, or any other time period is garbage for any number of reasons, from bands making use of modern technology (eg: iems, backing tracks, click track) to just moving away from guitar-focused songs. This line of thought belies a certain lack of ability to think philosophically about music or view the world with an artful grace, I think.
Music has always been a forward-looking art. All of your favourite bands in recorded music history were looking ahead at what fresh art they could create and add to the canon; they weren’t looking back at what music sounded like 40 years earlier and responding to a protectionist impulse, as if they were the vanguard against the encroaching armies of unfunky behaviour. That’s the job of music critics and folks who can’t play and can only impotently decry the unstoppable evolution of art and culture. Maybe the folks who espouse these ideas are embittered because they didn’t have “the right stuff” and their pet projects couldn’t get off their feet or maybe they did and their fifteen mins have since expired. Maybe they are just upset that their favourite genre isn’t in vogue anymore.
There is an absolute boat load of music in the world, especially since the turn of the 21st century. We all have our favourite genres and groups… This is wholesome and natural and human. But as George Clinton, one of the patron saints of Funk once said, “Free your mind and your @$$ will follow.”
And if that isn’t the gospel truth, I don’t know what is.
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