thoughts
Who Cares About Creativity?
There was time when originality was one of the most prized things in music. Bands and guitar players wanted to sound different from everyone else. I’m not sure that is the case anymore.
No doubt, part of it is the record companies fault. For decades, all most of them cared about was generating a hit (and the resulting money), and that usually meant copying whatever was popular at the moment. So new bands copied the style of what was currently popular. Which eventually grew stale thanks to over-saturation and the new bands were soon discarded. Bands were not encouraged to be original, only to have a hit.
Perhaps Guitar Hero and Rock Band are to blame. Kids seem to only want to learn songs from the games. There is nothing wrong with copying your heros, especially when you are starting out, but eventually you should want to try to do something original also.
Maybe TABs are to blame. They make it too easy to copy your guitar hero note for note. That is if the TABS are good. Unfortunately, many of the TABs available online are just plain wrong, and since they are copied from one website to another, there are a lot of bad TABs out there. Even you have good TABs, you are still only learning to copy another player by rote. Basically mimicking someone else. Which requires zero creativity, just lots of repetition.
Where are the creative players now? When The Edge (David Evans) of U2 became popular, his playing was totally unique. No one played guitar like he did before him. Now his style of playing has been done to death. Other were much the same: Les Paul, Wes Montgomery, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Carlos Santana, Brian May, etc. They were all very original voices on guitar in their eras, and they are still prized for their originality.
I am sure there are some creative players out there right now, but none has reached widespread fame, yet. Let’s hope they do. Perhaps they will turn up on YouTube and sweep the nation. Of course that will require people to be open to new music. Another sticky spot. Music is so compartmentalized now and tastes are so narrow (“I only play trash metal in drop C.”) I really hope there are still some young players out there who want to do something creative. How about you?
Reply: Ben
I just stumbled across this blog, if you would call it that, and I thought some of things you had to say were very interesting. However, I have a few comments. First of all I disagree with blaming Guitar Hero and Rock Band. A lot of those kids who play those games have had no prior exposure to all forms of rock music. Personally I believe that these games is a good starting point to find some of the most popular rock acts to have every played. Trying to break into any music genre can be really hard on your own without somebody experienced helping you and the creators of these games do know rock music very well. Although, these games, if taken too seriously, can be detrimental so I can see why you would feel that way towards them. Rock Band and Guitar Hero is something simple where people can feel involved with making music when they actually aren't.
I would also like to say that I think there are plenty of unique guitarists out there but they have become more focused in the independent music scene. Record companies have killed creativity, so it's up to underground artists to make new sounds. I think the indie movement is gaining a lot of strength and will get bigger as more music listeners mature and want to find people will their own sounds.
In my opinion, tastes have become so narrow because there are so many subgenres of music. You can easily say that you like one specific form of metal while you don't like another and even though they may be similar you have your reasons. But rather than people being close minded, I think it stems from a need to be different. It is a form of expression to be different and finding this genre that is unlike anything else you've listen to is big news for people discovering music.
I am a young, college musician and I struggle with finding my sound. You are very right, in saying that it's easy to copy what you hear or borrow from old greats. But with so much music out there, players can take two types of completely different music, pick out the interesting pieces and put together something completely new and unique. And the brilliance of it is that you're bound to fail searching for your sound, unlike bands that buy a sound and get famous from the record companies.