The Making of a Band part 1: Thesis

Music, like everything else, is cyclic. There is a period of discovery with raw noise and primitive beat that becomes the base layer that will later become a genre to be labled by the masses and then the slow degeneration/progression to the fine tuned and mastered medium that has been created. This is how everything starts and eventually ends. Look at any band, any genre, any time period. I'm going to use Punk Rock as an example for this dissertation simply because it is the first genre that I identified with as a musical format beyond entertainment. There has been a lot of debate about when punk rock started but if you ask me it started with the Ramone's. The Ramone's were the first band to leave behind the overproduction of music and get back to basics. They came together and grabbed instruments and simply made noise that was listenable...barely. They wanted to create noise and tell the story of their generation and they did so at a decible level that made it inevitable for you to listen to.

So what's the secret to their success? It's simple...they were something different. At a time when the only thing on the radio was disco or some bastardized version of a sixties throwback band, along came a group of kids that didn't agree with the status quo and the gentrification of the drug culture and completely destroyed everything that made music dull and repititious. The secret is to figure out the formula of mainstream success and figure out how to tear it down to it's skeleton...and then rape it. Be loud and obnoxious. Be something that makes people cringe and package it into something that hasn't been done before. There is no right or wrong when you decide to create a movement in the world of pop culture, you just have to keep feeding it to them until they respond. All you need is the creativity to make a beat that speaks to your time period and the perseverance to see it through to fruition.

The problem with any medium or style is that people feel the need to refine it to an art form. They don't realize that once it is refined it loses all of the raw passion that made it an artistic medium in the first place. We started with the Ramones and we ended with AFI. We started with RunDMC and we ended with 50cent. We started with Bach and ended with Pachelbel. Now, once again, we are revisiting the era of the peak of pop culture with music from the likes of Katie Perry and Furgy that don't really have a ton of talent but are over-produced to the point of listenability.

Pop is on the wane and we are looking for the next group of rebel's to throw our own shit back in our faces...and not a moment too soon.