Kimberly Steele

Before I begin criticizing the state of music as I see it, let me first expose some of my own failures as a musician. I am only truly excellent in two areas of music and neither of them is performance. One: I have a profound grasp of music theory and an ear to match.  Two: I'm extremely good at spitting out new melodies and harmonies, and a good proportion of them are catchy, including the zillion ones I compose for my cat and throw out. In every other aspect of musicianship, I consider myself moderately skilled to mediocre. I am a lousy sightreader, a middle of the road pianist, a semi-okay guitarist, a decent but unexceptional singer, and until the last decade, a late-blooming slow learner who was still learning certain Music 201 basics in her twenties because of a combination of mental blocks and sheer laziness. One of the reasons I am a good teacher of music is because I'm not a virtuoso performer.  I still know what it is to struggle, and I don't have to delve that far into my past to remember being mystified by various realms of musical study.

Take any opinion of mine, on the subject of music or otherwise, with a grain of salt. I am not a concert pianist and my original music is obscure and unknown. Nevertheless, I reserve strong opinions about music.

Opera Sucks

There are some operas, La Boheme, for instance, that are intensely beautiful and moving. If you are given a synopsis of the story beforehand or understand sung Italian, there are operas that will change your life. The problem is one of "having to be there."  Most of us cannot afford to see an opera.  For one, if we live near a city where an opera is being staged by a great troupe of musical artists including a pit orchestra and opera singers, there is the problem of not being able to get the time off to make a night of traveling into the city as well as the cost of transportation, opera tickets, and a meal before or after.  Operas aren't short -- if you have the privilege of seeing one, you'll need to stop and eat.  It's no wonder that the dwindling audiences that used to partially fill the opera house and the symphony center were largely white, old, and well-monied.  Nobody else had the resources to try opera, and opera, like symphonic music, is far better experienced live.  Music is a largely etheric phenomenon.  For those of you who don't know what the etheric plane is, consider it to be the plane of energy that is akin to the Force in Star Wars movies.  The special energy of live music cannot be had any other way.

Another problem with opera is the singers.  They're what Randy from American Idol calls "pitchy".  I can sing loud and on pitch.  It's a matter of projection.  I know it's not impossible; the reason people come to me for voice lessons is because I know how to project without screaming or becoming pitchy.  It's a technique.  I'm not sure why so many famed opera singers pile onto the extra vibrato train, but they do, and though it raises the snob appeal of opera, for me it ruins otherwise lovely pieces of music.  These singers have as good or better aural capabilities than I do, so why do they flail around the pitch like a bee closing in on a coneflower?  Vibrato is like perfume: a little goes a long way.  Kiri Te Kanawa bathes in Chanel No. 5 as far as my ears are concerned.  I can tell her ear is impeccable but I cannot stand to listen to her.  Renée Fleming is more pleasant; at least she hits the notes reliably with a minimum of vibrato.  I do tend to enjoy Purcell and other early operas because their style doesn't mandate as much vibrato, but overall, the matronly, rooster crow warblings of opera singers make me cringe.

Museum Music

Most of the music we are expected to like and preserve is museum music.  We are supposed to love everything Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, and Wagner ever wrote because they have been listed as the greats.  I often find Mozart's pieces stilted or syrupy.  I know I'm not allowed to say that.  I can already hear the thousand rallying cries of "but that's the Rococo era and the neo-Classic revival" blah de blah.  If you are enjoying this sacrilege, Haydn is boring most of the time.  He has about two album's worth of great tunes and the rest is filler.  What do you expect from a guy whose comfortable lifestyle depended on being a music mill for a pathologically bored prince?  Wagner's music is awful to all except the chosen few who understand him, and I am not one of those chosen few.  Don't even get me started on atonal music and any form of Musique Concrete.  It's garbage and the people who write it are delusional.  One of their delusions is that they are making music.

Sadder yet is the attempt to revive what is called classical music (I think Classic Music is a more fitting term, because like Classic Rock, it implies a vintage) via "new" composers.  Yes, I have heard of Alma Deutscher.  Have you heard of Marian McPartland?  She's the kind of vital composer/educator I hope Deutscher becomes when she grows up.  

The Music of Our Time

The music of our common era has always displeased me.  Who knew the I-IV-V chord progression had so many iterations?  Or the I-vi-IV-V?  Layer that crap over an annoying beat and throw on some ear-shredding, autotuned vocals and you have a hit ad jingle ahem I mean pop song.  Modern tunes ALL sound like ad jingles.  Music has gotten so bad, the only way a pop star can glean a modicum of attention is via softcore porn in the form of music videos.  I would not be even slightly surprised if the sleazebag influencers (I refuse to call them artists, they're not) creating this tripe resorting to full on X rated porno featuring penetration in order to shock jaded youngsters into watching their torpefying sexual antics.  Cardi B keeps writing the same "song" over and over.  She requires a team of producers to do what unknown teenagers do in their basements with freeware.  Unfortunately for her and fortunately for us, her career will be over in less than a decade.  Let's just hope she doesn't resort to the desperate antics I mentioned earlier in this paragraph as her youth fades.

Rap

Speaking of Cardi B, was there ever a whinier, lazier, greedier, or sleazier genre than American rap?  When rap began, it was fun and edgy.  It was the music of the people, not of the producers.  Though swearing to a rhyme scheme to a looping ad jingle is more impressive than free verse or prose, like constant in-your-face sexuality, it's Dullsville.  Any tune that contains rap these days has one or more of these three obsessive themes:

1.) Money.  "I have more money than you, ha ha, I'm so rich."

2.) Cheap, exploitative sex.

3.) Ego.  "I'm better than you because you're a loser and I'm not."

Sadly, these themes have spread to infect almost all pop music.  Note to the would-be pop music artists out there: pick a theme that has nothing to do with money, sexual relationships, or how much better you are than your rivals, I double dog dare you.

Autotune

Autotune is everywhere in vocal music.  It's in rap, it's in pop, it's in musicals, it's even in country music.  If I am ever shot into space, I believe I will be able to detect the frosty, clipped chirrup of autotune from 15,000 miles before simultaneously freezing and exploding, I hate it that much.  Like vibrato, autotune is fine in tiny doses, but does anyone ever use it that way? No.  I am a professional at pitch-correction, and because I know how to do it, I know how lazy the modern audio engineer is when it comes to batch correcting vocals.  Just make the singer do it again, for crying out loud.  Hard drives are cheap, yet the economy with which tracks are autotuned makes me think these bigwigs are still working with analog tape decks in their rigs.  How else do you explain that much editing on such a tiny bit of material?

Excuses

The above condemnation is a massive oversimplification of what music is out there.  I may like to kvetch, but all in all it is a great time to be a musician.  Never before has it been so easy to record your own music.  There is a whole world out there beyond the two styles I complain about in this article, and I highly suggest you explore it.  Within the two realms I described, there are great artists and performances.  Beyond them lie entire realms of musical magic.  If I have any hope of making musical magic myself, may the gods help me!  That's why I'm going to wrap this up now, because my tunes have not yet learned to write and produce themselves!