Music for Monkeys

This may seem novel, but cutting edge technology has always inspired new music, e.g. tape machines in the 50s. The problem here is that the novelty is making it appear that it is somehow inherently interesting. Apparently this is only done to rise above the wreckage of struggling musicians still playing guitars and other traditional instruments, and to grandstand on YouTube. What really matters though is the music, which in this case is nicely composed, and methodically planned. In most cases, without musicians that know musical syntax, the wreckage will be all the dreck that will flood MySpace and YouTube.

Malcolm McLaren has been singing the praises of chip music for sometime now, and it is catching on. McLaren is a proponent of the idea of music being the "sound of fashion" or the "look of music", which is an interesting cross-domain idea. But alas we are bewitched by groupthink, and we make art that monkeys can make. In fact, I can envision experiments with chimpanzees, where they make hit music by tapping on game boys, and then get the reward of a banana. With humans, we seem to be doing the same experiment, which we run on ourselves, post the results on YouTube and get the reward banana of thousands of hits.

That said, I am all for experiments such as this. Even monkeys get bored with the same stuff over and over.

Next: The iBand on treadmills