Inspired by a Facebook friend.  We’ll pick it up from his last statement:

I think people are so concerned with the lifestyle of musicians that they forget about music. The original rock movement was due to the invention of the electric guitar, something new and inspiring. This current music situation is a lack of effort and creativity. It's a sad situation when Disney and American Idol dictate the music industry (…) Kanye is a self-righteous, loudmouth gay fish. I don't see how anyone ever took him seriously. he is the George W. Bush of the rap world, nobody really like(s) him, but they're forced to put up with him.

That  paragraph about Kanye is genius.

As for the music thing, you know I've been saying for years that I haven't been really HIT by anything since maybe 1994, 1995.  Once in a while you go 'that's a great hook' or 'they've got some talent,' but nothing reaches out and grabs you by the throat the way so much of the music before 1995 did for me.  Not necessarily in the aggressive sense, but iin the sense of MAKING you pay attention. 

I think a big part of the problem, too, is it seems like you've got all of these bands out there who were moved by their predecessors, but for the last decade and a half or so it's been all motion and no E-motion.  All I see is a bunch of kids trying really hard to earnestly pretend to be sincere and heartfelt.   I went to a local show a little while back just to check it out, and it was a bunch of guys that looked like they WISHED they looked like Dave Grohl dressed in unwashed white t-shirts.  The music was competent, but not in any way outstanding or moving.

I'm sure you remember how often I harped on the importance of feeling your art, whatever it is.  If you feel it, your audience will feel it, and they will love you (assuming you're at least minimally competent).  I don't think 99% of the bands out right now could feel a punch in the mouth.  And if they did they'd look like they were faking it. 

All the moves, none of the groove. 

It's not the mechanics of your heroes that makes them your heroes; it's the underlying emotions and feelings and philosophy or whatever that made them create the things they created that made them heroes.   Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” was not written by a flippin’ focus group.  The beatles did not sit around going “well, dark suits and narrow ties are in, and this ‘guitar’ music is getting over nicely in the states, let’s do that.”  They came up with their own thing and did it, and it changed over time, and because they believed in it, we believed in it, and it changed us over time as well.

The first time I heard Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, or even Bon Jovi in the 80’s (back when he was less earnest, but more sincere) I knew that these were songs we would be listening to in ten or twenty years.  Very, very rarely does anything I hear hit me that hard anymore.  I was actually wrong about the last one – the Oak Ridge Boys’ cover of “Seven Nation Army” didn’t get over).  While I’ve considered that maybe the problem is me, I’m not convinced – when I play the emotion is still there.  When I listen to the songs I admire the sincerity and conviction is there for me.  The reason I every wanted to be a musician is because I wanted to move people the way I was moved, and I think that’s a major root of the motivation of most musicians, at least when they start.  But we seem to have lost sight of the fact that just imitating the gestures of sincerity is not sincerity, no matter how much you really, really want to be good at it. 

Music comes from feeling.  ANY genre of music comes from emotion and the desire to share that emotion, be it religious ecstasy or an exhortation to stand against a great wrong or just “who wants to get drunk and party.”

The very BEST music comes from that rare confluence of exceptional talent, exceptional skill, exceptional passion, and exceptional sincerity of expression.  This is “Sgt. Pepper” and “Angie” and “Fade to Black” and “Kashmir” and “Rusty Cage.” 

Here’s an experiment:  Listen to “Photograph” by Nickleback, and then listen to “Say Hello 2 Heaven” by Temple of the Dog, and tell me which one sounds like the band meant it, and which one sounds like they went “Okay, so this is what our ten favorite bands look and sound like then they mean it, let’s look and sound JUST LIKE THAT and people will think we mean it too!”

I would also caution against giving ANY tool too much credit.  Any creative person in the throes of creativity will tell you that it runs through you and moves you the direction it wants you to go, regardless of how it’s expressed. 

Seriously, people.  Artistic expression is not a means to an end:  it is an end in and of itself.  It has no “point,” ultimately; it is the point.Stop trying to fake it.

P.S.  If you need an autotuner to sing, you are not a singer.  Thank you.