Key Concepts

Authenticity and Aesthetics

Modern popular music is often created with similar software, samples and robotic voices. This means that it is difficult at times to spot distinctive characteristics in a new artist or a band. The heavy processing that occurs during the production and mixing stages also adds to the equation. Over time, artists have used every sort of stratagem in order to achieve authenticity and originality often playing with their image, clothing and personal lyrics. In current times this has gone far beyond the music sphere thanks to the use of social networks. Personally, I try to build authenticity mostly within the music itself. I spend countless time in the studio to craft my sound and its perception. Perhaps, the 80% of this sort of work gets discarded, because simply is not original. Crafting a distinctive sound that is distinctive requires isolation from our music heroes and restriction of the imitation process that occurs within all of us. Destabilising the audience is often something I try to do when it comes to building up authenticity with lyrics. This is often achieved with the use of quirky content, or simply by making statements that are not necessarily going to be unanimously agreed. In fact, according to Barker and Taylor “The road of personal authenticity is a lonely one” (2007: 172).

Flow

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi we reach a state of flow when we feel skilled enough to face the task approaching us, and yet we perceive that this is challenging enough to boost our excitement and direct us into a state of ecstasy. In this state composers often do not even perceive their body, nor needs such as anger or tiredness, often forgetting to eat or sleep. When we feel intimidated by a task we just need to build up more skills, when we feel too comfortable we need to make the task more challenging to prevent boredom, and that should drive our mindset in a state of flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). This is a very interesting concept, although I have mixed feelings about it. While I believe it is extremely valuable to raise awareness about the practical reasons behind full or partial involvement in a process, my critique would be that perhaps these statements are somehow diminishing how challenging it is already to build up such skills. At the same time, this does not justify why we find certain skill-building tasks exciting and some other boring. Perhaps I would rather address this area using the term momentum, because it is easier to make an analogy with riding a bicycle. When we initially start pedaling our force is much more than when we reach the momentum, so that after a while the bicycle requires less effort from us. When addressing tasks, the most difficult part for me is to start. Once I started things slowly increase the speed, almost automatically. For this reason, rather than making a task harder, the best thing I can do to generate excitement when I seem to be procrastinating is to start with something simple and fast to accomplish. This will usually hook me up to more tasks after. Almost every time I say out loud “let’s just do 30 minutes of work and then you are free” I eventually end up with a solid 8 hours work session. I still find Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi thesis interesting and I may try applying them to my workflow at times, although I guess we are all different and we all achieve our flow differently which is one of those things that makes us unique.

Sources:

Barker, H. and Taylor, Y. (2007) Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. London: Faber & Faber

Ted, (2004) Flow, the secret to happiness. [online]. Available from https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness#t-1024602 [20 March 2021]