1. Eulogy For Music
Imagine a world bereft of the joys and pleasures that make this current one bearable. Still, there are necessities such as food and drink and shelter (though even these can be spotty at best). But the certain sparkle that sound waves once made reverberates no longer.
Imagine a world without soft sounds to fall asleep to. How can one trust that they will be protected by the silence once they close their eyes at night? And during waking hours, what then? How can the time pass without music?
Imagine a world in which music has gone away almost entirely; a world where nobody makes music for the walls outside their own bedroom; a world where the constant discouragement of early artists has progressed to its logical conclusion: that the artform no longer exists.
This imagined world, one without music is difficult to conceive for some.
After all, isn’t music inherent to human nature? Wouldn’t enough born-to-be artists eventually find their destined instruments, no matter the obstacle?
The artist makes art from their straitjacket, constantly searching for ways to free themselves from the binds of a world where art and capitalism are unnaturally forced to coexist. The artist is unable to fully realize their work without the thought of profit. Dollar signs loom overhead with the constant pressure to commercialize art in order to generate revenue and an audience.
These same rules apply with the internet, which once held the potential to serve as a great equalizer for all artists to have the same opportunities and platforms to showcase their work. But instead, artists still have to follow a certain cadence and fit into a specifically sized box in order for the algorithms to deem them worthy of promotion.
The death of art is imminent. Technological advancements are only accelerating.
In real-time we can observe efforts to replace human-made art with the expansion of Artificial Intelligence. Companies progressively encroach on our artistic practices, trying to find ways to make them more efficient. Artists, just like many other professions over the course of our history, are slowly losing their jobs to machines.
The money-hungry, greedy minds that overwhelmingly control how our society works will not spare the artist in their perpetual quests for maximum profit.
I hate to break it to you, my fellow artist, but as you read this, they are diligently training softwares that will eventually have relatively the same ability to write and perform as we do. At the very least, they are finding ways to shorten or eliminate the sacred process essential to creating art made by humans.
Of course the death of art is already in process. It has been initiated by the disinvestment of art in schools and public programs. Money is often tight, and art is thought to be extracurricular, not essential. It is always the first to go.
The artist will soon be endangered, and if we are not careful and persistent in our protection plan, they will become extinct. Art will become a historical artifact, a thing of the past.
The reality of a world without music is much closer than it may seem. There are oppressed groups in our current world that already have to deal with severe censorship in their art. Some are prevented from creating and consuming art entirely.
The inner workings of our society are very delicate. Based on the current trajectory, no artist or artform is safe from collapsing into the abyss.
Welcome to The Underground Society for Blogs. In these entries we will seek to eulogize our chosen artforms while they still exist by honoring and celebrating them in whatever ways we can.
So ode to music!
It died a long and slow
And painful death
And the bystanders who watched
The demise as it happened
Struggled to deal with excruciating guilt
Or simply continued on with their lives, unencumbered
