When you hear a song on a corporate radio station, or off a major label CD, do you ever say to yourself “This makes me feel funny” or “this makes my head hurt a little” or “is this even actually music?” Chances are if you are reading this, and have therefore chosen to visit the website of a vinyl-only, hand-made record label, then you have probably thought some variation of those thoughts. Here’s why I think the music on the radio makes me feel bad…

Four related issues: Sampling, Quantizing, Autotune, & Limiting.
When I say sampling, I don’t mean tape loops, or DJ’s with records… I mean the practice of recording 100+ takes of a single musical passage, and then choosing the “best” pieces (or few seconds) from each recording and pasting them together into one seemingly continuous passage of music. This is a modern practice in mainstream music, present in almost every genre since the late 80’s, right around when music started to sound a little less human (go figure). The illusion of a live, single take performance is created, but is in fact an artifice.

Quantizing is the practice of using a computer to reinterpret/rearrange digital recordings to make them “perfectly” in time. Quantizing is done with essentially every component of music in the corporate recording world, but it is easiest to describe using drums… A drummer’s recording session would go something like this… He or she would play the drum pattern, and fills, and the engineers would record it live, then they would have the drummer record each drum hit individually. Then the engineers use the live performance as a guide and using the samples of each drum sound, they recreate it, now perfectly mathematically quantized by the computer.

Autotune is a software technology developed in 1998 that can correct the pitch of any recording, in post-production, but it is mostly used on vocals, and saxophones (weird right?). Making every single note, “pitch perfect,” eliminating any traces of error, or idiosyncrasy, essentially removing the human element. David Byrne once said: “The better someone’s voice is, the harder it is for me to believe what they are saying.” Right on David… I’ll take it a step further and say, the more technically perfect a person’s computerized voice is, the less capable they are of saying anything at all.

Limiting is the practice of pushing each instrument or aspect of a recording to an even and maximum threshold of volume. Limiting is done in three stages, during the recording and mixing, during CD mastering, and by radio stations before broadcast. From the perspective of someone against extreme limiting, I can say that this practice serves to flatten the sound field, pushing sounds together into the same 2-dimentional space, eliminating subtlety. From the perspective of the radio station or major label, limiting makes sure every song on the radio sounds like the same volume, it means you can hear the lyrics to the song in a noisy bar, it means you can hear the cow-bell over the engine of your car, or at low volume in the dentist’s office. Thus ensuring every song and sound can claim space in your already over-crowded ears. This type of brick wall limiting is not possible with vinyl records, because certain frequencies of sound can cause the stylus (needle) to jump out of the groove. So records have retained a depth of field, a subtlety of sounds, which you have already experienced, either consciously or subconsciously. [Activity: Put a vinyl record on your turntable, then plug in your Mp3 player to your stereo, synch up a song that is on the record and in your Mp3’s. Then switch back and forth between the vinyl and Mp3 on your receiver. How does it sound different? What makes you feel more complete?”]

It is estimated that in any major label recording since 2002 you are listening to less than three seconds of continuous live music. This is in an effort to make “perfect” recordings, (or perhaps for more sinister reasons) but these notions of “perfection” seriously miss the mark, and deprive us of a fundamental human communion between sounds and soul. Consider for a moment a famous work of art, for simplicities sake, Vincent Van Gough’s “Starry Night.” Now imagine someone looking at that painting and saying “you know, that brush stroke in the lower left hand corner is perfect, it’s the best brush stroke on the whole canvas.” After identifying the “perfect brush” stroke, they scan it into a computer, and cut and paste the stroke, bending it, rotating it, and color adjusting it, to recreate the “Starry Night” but this time only with “perfect” brush strokes. Of course it looks better right? No it looks like something sterile, something flat and purposeless, something untouched, and unloved, something not human. This is in essence the same practice of the corporate music world. But why destroy the beauty implicit in the imperfections of creation? Perhaps a difficult question to answer, and maybe one only answerable by the illuminati, but I will hazard a conspiracy theory… could this be just another extension of the invisible hand of oppression? By taking music, (the most natural, most innate form of human expression) and perverting it completely, (wrenching it from the fertile womb of human history, prying it from the warm arms of all us) and making it “perfect,” and therefore unrelatable, unattainable, inaccessible… the corporate world succeeds in weakening us all more powerfully then they could have possibly foreseen. With music belonging only to them, we rely on them to supply it, so they get our money of course, but they also shape expression, or the lack there of, and society stays stagnant, now deprived of a great vehicle of change. We sense we are deprived of something, we feel deeply wounded, but we don’t know by what, but the suspicion rises deep down somewhere (albeit unexpressed) that the new Top 40 single will never fulfill us as much as the simple pulse of our mother’s heartbeat.

Music and song and rhythm are an essential part of all pre-industrial societies, personal and group forms of expression and communion. Song is/was used in celebration, mourning, ritual, rights of passage, mystic ceremony, and in almost every imaginable way almost constantly. It belongs to us all equally, our birthright as inheritors of our human history. But sadly it is not true that we all feel we can express music, or understand it, and instead of gathering together and singing in celebration of the birth of a new baby in our village, we head to the mall and look for a mass-produced gift for the baby shower. So we are in turn more heavily shackled to commerce, and divorced from our rituals, but we miss them, and helplessly fill their void with things that poison us. But you know the rituals, you know you do, you can play music, imperfect and powerful. Radio destroying musics, major label exploding songs that clip the ponytails of “record execs” world-round, and reclaim what is rightfully ours. Be hopeful, be giving, be musicians.

Sincerely,
Fletcher Tucker (Gnome Life Maker & Bird By Snow Singer, heretic, now & forever)

P.S. Sorry about no footnotes on all of these “facts” most of this stuff comes from many years of trying to figure out why the radio made me feel like I was dieing, and how it was killing me and what parts were dieing… I haven’t kept track of what books and articles and people have told me all these things, not that they are revolutionary or something, but feel free to consider it all hearsay.