Blaise Bailey Finnegan III
This man has committed blasphemy in the most beautiful of ways. To the usual superfans of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and some other bands of such lofty status, touching a GY!BE song is akin to spitting on the bible. To me, the bible is just a book, but even I – a steadfast atheist – would find that disrespectful.
You can understand, then, why my expectations for this video were not very high when it first came up in the section of YouTube’s homepage that displays videos recommended based on personal viewing patterns. But I didn’t have high expectations for a video titled “2girls1cup” either – and we all know how epic that piece of cinematic gold turned out to be.
Whether you know GY!BE or not, it’s important to note that YouTube user gihm has managed to take a near-orchestral composition by a band that claims up to thirteen past and present members and successfully condensed it into a solo acoustic piece. Other covers tackled include songs by Efterklang, Múm, Joanna Newsom and Rachel’s, among others.
This YouTube user is demonstrating something I hold very close to my heart – music experimentalism. Through creative use of arrangement and playing techniques, gihm was able to successful create a beautiful work of art that not only pays tribute to a respected band but also stands alone as an accomplishment in its own right.
When I was a senior in high school, I purchased a $70 Belkin stereo microphone for my 3rd generation iPod.
It was in response to a) curiosity, b) changing musical influences and c) seeing other “nobodies” creating sounds independently of any organization. With things lying around my basement, I recorded a song titled “The Keys Are Brightly Burning As My Fingers Slide Past.” My first music project outside of school – [praw] – was born.
My work with [praw] devoured my free time, and that project eventually spun into The Purple Paring Knife, The Assh*le Pr*ject, Pushmi-Pullyu and The Purrring Pythonsss, among other projects that I choose to forget or not mention. Since starting [praw], I have come a long way. I have developed methods of creation on several applications as well as with instruments I have no training in. To date – within the last 4-or-so years – I have created at least three hundred (300) recordings amounting to well over twenty hours of audio. I work on some aspect of recording, performing or writing almost every day. Not even moving to Norway for a year has slowed me down. I can’t help it.
These numbers are not meant to be seen as boasting. The quantity does not necessarily represent quality, though I have been happy with everything I’ve recorded and released at some moment during my development. Instead, I wish the numbers to serve as a demonstration that music creation has become a very important part of my life in the last so-many years. It was important to me before this time, of course; I was a member of band and choir as soon as I could be and stayed very involved as long as possible (college quashed that). I can say with the strongest of conviction that my decision to spend $70 on a simple stereo microphone changed my life. My involvement, dedication to and appreciation of music is greater now than ever before. I can not begin to count the friends, acquaintances and lives I have come to know because of music experimentalism.
One issue has been tearing at the back of my head for some time now. If experimentalism has become so important to me now, why was I not exposed to it earlier? Surely I could have come much farther as an artist and lay person if I had been exposed to experimentalism, say, in middle school as opposed to before moving away to college. By nature, experimentalism needs to be figured out independently, but surely someone could have pointed me in the right direction much earlier. Somebody – anybody – could have slapped a microphone in my hand with a piece of paper saying, “Audacity.” These simple clues would have been enough. But that did not happen. I had to discover my inclinations – and that many others share these same inclinations – on my own. Knowing what I know now, it seems like cruel fate; like losing something only to find it in your hand all along.
I believe that we need to change the lack of music experimentalism in public. That is, we need to “teach” experimentalism. General art classes seem to be the only places in public schools where a child is encouraged to be creative and experiment, but even then are they given often strict guidelines and are eventually judged on some qualitative basis. Our music classes certainly do not encourage experimentalism. The closest we get is the experimentalism that has become the body of jazz standards. Why is it that schools will teach jazz, yet completely forget the extremely experimental nature that jazz was and still is? There was never a class where I was told to put down the instrument I had bound myself to in 5th grade and make something new – something even avant-garde or silly at worst. Instead, I was told to read what someone had written and perfect a style of playing that was decidedly definitive.
One of this year’s most popular songs is titled “My Girls.” This Animal Collective song would most definitely not exist without a sense of experimentalism.
Mentioned earlier, jazz is a great example of experimentalism in music. I do not understand how this can be forgotten. Nor that both The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were very experimental in nature. Their experimentation become innovation. Everything new ever has come about because of accidents and/or experimentation.
That is the way it always will be.
