MUSIC IS AN EXPERIENCE – NOT A PRODUCT
- bring the real and it might be worth something again
Rock and roll used to be an experience. Now it’s a product, a vicarious, staged narrative. There’s nothing true. It’s always been about the elite rock and roll set, the select few who ‘understood’ the hidden code but the pleasure in the quest, the democracy of it all, was that it could possibly be you. Now there are no codes except barcodes and balance sheets and trying to work out who’s joined the Illuminati to secure their position in the charts.
I must be getting old or cynical or both but I don’t particularly care. At least I truly can recall a time when music was real, the most essential part of my consciousness. Ten years old and being told by the parents that there was absolutely no way I was ever going to the town disco in Barnsley resulted in me not eating for three days. Bribery and corruption followed in the form of 50p pocket money a week instead. So on the Saturday I knew exactly what I wanted; I’d heard it on the radio for weeks: ‘Oh Yeah’ by Roxy Music– the most exotic tune I’d ever heard. I bought it, it belonged to me and in our nice safe playroom in Barnsley, on the old chest of a record player which had only previously played Hank Marvin, The Shadows, gospel music and Rupert the Bear, I gave it its first seven inch experience. The aching, seductive guitar intro lifted me far away from the grey confines of my limited existence to places of yearning, possibility and a sadness I’d yet to encounter – but it make me feel that it would be worth it. That was it; I’d cracked a way, just like my library card, into different worlds, places and times only now there was something more – feelings. Music was my introduction to an emotional life.
Decades on, it takes me just a mouse click to get the tune again. I have a moment of nostalgia and yes, the song is still fine. Music is more than a song, more than an artist. It’s a connection. It’s a unique experience – in this case, the process: saving up, having to face the cool intimidation of a record shop and rude burly sales assistants who looked at you like you were a deformed cockroach so that it took gumption just to even ask for the single. Walking through town with your prized possession in a Casa Disco small white plastic bag, accumulating furtive glances of admiration and reassessment despite my corduroy jeans and Hush Puppy loafers. The bus ride home, studying the cover, imagining what was about to unfold, building a story, your heart racing. Getting home. Shutting both doors so no one could hear, no one but you. Taking it out of the sleeve, feeling the vinyl, seeing the name of the song on the centre disc, knowing you owned it. The needle hitting that first groove, crackle and …! You were there, it was here. It was here! Really, in your home, in your life. And you danced and believed all things were possible.
I mean, come on! How does that ever compare to an iPod, a laptop, music on 24/7? I don’t want music to be accessible – I want it to be inaccessible. I want the journey, the adventure, the quest, the experience. That is what makes music rock and roll. Not the marketing, not convenience.
Festivals and gigs were epic voyages into the unknown. Every festival was an odyssey – sometimes good, sometimes bad but always real, always mine, always worth it because it brought a heightened awareness, a new understanding. A festival was not a ‘things-to-do’ list, a hectic tour of somebody else’s world to somebody else's agenda. The whole point was this is where your own thoughts, feelings and dreams could run free – maybe change you. Maybe change the world.
Now we have two generations of rock and roll tourists: deprived youngsters who desperately search for the Holy Grail, buying all the memorabilia, the merchandise, books, back catalogues, taking the drugs like prescription, ticking the boxes. But the whole point of rock and roll is it’s your life, your world, you’re not being dictated to in this private universe. Now you are, very much so – by the marketing man, the politicians. Rock and roll has been hijacked.
Even the drugs have changed. LSD used to be LSD – a unique, one-off mind-altering experience. Ecstacy was equally a specific phenomenon. Nowadays they are all the same: just watered down toxins with labels to sell them but the result on uneducated, emotionally dead minds is just a chaotic shambles of wobbly, disorientated idiots, regardless of what they believe they have taken. There’s no content within them for the drugs to work on anymore. So what really is the point of taking them?
Music was my journey, is my journey. It’s taken me everywhere I ever wanted to go and further. It’s been my passport to the universe. I love the God who created it and all it displays of His infinite beauty and I hate everything that has limited, degraded and misrepresented it to the youth, everything that has robbed them of the fullness of this life.
Reading Keith Richards’ ‘Life’, you totally get why he truly is a living legend. He is music, he allowed his experience to change him, he is a decent, full, vital human being, both enriched and enriching others through his connection with music. That’s how music, real music, works. It’s a daily sacrifice, a process, a delight, a trauma, a breakdown, an epiphany. It isn’t a section on a computer. It’s integral to life and it deserves integrity.
So when human beings become artists who become worthy again, when they stop being technicians, stop idolising money and rock and roll bank accounts from the 90s and start bringing some soul and truth into their music, maybe I’ll start believing today’s music is worth listening to. Until then, I’ll have to make do with a nostalgic iPod.