November 15th, 1997

'At the heart of every story is a sound - something so deep that it resonates like a pressure in your chest.' Edward Zick wrote that as the introduction for his film, Legends of the Fall, and it's a sentiment that I'm quite willing to support. If you've read the article by Harlan Ellison (on my Page of Writing), then you'll also know that it's an understanding echoed in writing. And it's true. If I don't hear this primal song somewhere deep in the recesses of my soul, this gut feeling that tells me I've somehow managed to bypass the human consciousness, then I scrap the work without another thought. And I'm not bitter about losing days (or even weeks) of labor. Because - quite simply - if I don't have that feeling, then the work wasn't worth it to begin with.

The same, I gather, is true of every medium. Let's take the specific case of music. If a song doesn't make you walk away without feeling some vestige of emotion (whether sadness or anger or joy), then it wasn't music to begin with. It wasn't worth the time you spent listening to it.

One of the most disturbing trends I've noticed is an increasing blindness to the boundary between music and drivel. It galls me that so many lackwits are able to just sit in front of a television and just soak up hours and hours worth of fast-paced, badly-edited video clips. Shows like MTV feed off the diseased flotsam that passes itself off for 'art' in the modern world. The whiney screams of Mariah Carey. The suave babble of Puff Daddy. The discordant mangling of Oasis. The general hysteria of the Spice Girls. And what's worse is that these dime-a-dozen 'musicians' (and I use the term loosely) know that they're producing trash. Why do you think they bother to remake so many classic songs? As for me, I'd rather endure a slow and painful death than listen to Tina Arena's 'Burn' one more time.