Style and Substance

I know it's been a long time since my last post, but I've been busy. Mostly with procrastinating, watching Youtube and putting together my album(s). As anyone who has spent any time watching Youtube would understand, out of the three activities listed I have gotten the most intellectual stimulation out of the third, so music will (once again) be the subject of my musings.

When you're writing music, considerations of audience inevitably come into play. Unless of course you're an avant-garde experimental musician. But even then you still have an audience, even if their willingness to fetishize any eclectic composition you produce gives you greater creative latitude than the average artist enjoys.

When considering the audience, I'm always torn between balancing what people want to hear and what I feel they need to hear. And it is a delicate balance; my own music consumption patterns tell me that. In my portable music player I have, at any one time, mainstream rock, underground rap, Japanese pop and a whole stack of BBC podcasts. After experiencing both extremes, it has become my view that it is, in the words of the good book, 'good to hold onto one and not let go of the other'. That's certainly the mix that I try to achieve with my music.

And this is not to say that I don't enjoy today's music; I'll still bump that new Lil Wayne track if I'm feeling it. And yet I can't shake the feeling that music is starting to lose sight of the delicate balance between style and substance somewhat. But, proving that maybe I was wrong about getting more intellectual stimulation from music than from Youtube, a Chris Rock clip I found while trawling the video site seems to say it best: