Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. - Carl Sagan, 1934-1996
"I'm looking at somebody who belongs to my world" "This is your world - I am your only world"
This struck me hard. He was a huge influence among several members of our band. We have been embraced his works from references in our daily locution to thematic scapes in our lyrics even to the carving in backside of my iPod. His art carry on in our hearts and minds.. Thank you.
Ok, what is this shit? Since the dawn of modern time men has tried to get through their life as easy as possible with automating complex or just dull tasks with machines. Well, progress has been quite impressive and many fingers has been replaced by wires and fewer hands with clamps succesfully in factories... but automated creative work?
I'm really perplexed by this. I don't know if I should laugh my ass of from quite campy advertisement of Microsoft product running on macbook and crappy actors or be terrified by the basic idea of taking away the freedom of creative arts and making illusion to anyone that they have talents to do music? All I know for sure is that those "happy" and "jazzy"- sliders must be the most hilariously confusing thing I've seen in a while.
But if we sit down and start reasoning the meaning of this phenomena, automated creativity, the advertised idea that Everyone has music or song inside and they need to let that out. Where it will lead?. We've seen this before in some form, reality TV formats such as popstars, Idols etc. But Microsoft cunningly tops all this by cutting out competition, now everyone can be heard. I really can't imagine how strongly that little program (ok, not that little) will affect on basic quality of MySpace, YouTube and other interactive web2.0 communities by spamming them quite full of different kinds of awful shit, varying from little Miss popstar - wannabes like your little sister to a love songs towards your best friend, wrote by your dad. Yeah, I'm terrified too.
But if anyone ever manages to make anything listenable with Songsmith, who will own the rights to that song? I'm quite sure that Microsoft has some kind of kickback on copyrights and eventually they own millions of bytes crap all over the modern Internet but maybe, eventually, some good songs. Time will show. If this product flops, it will be huge success as camp, if it really breaks through there is a slight potential that it will be really huge. iTunes of 2010. That is not comfortable idea. I really like that even just plainly bad bands that exist today are bad, but they do not exist in same numbers as, lets say, for example, population of some suburb where every teen has something to say with their "music".
Now you are thinking that "does it really work?". Our drummer Jesse bravely downloaded it and did a little song for all of us. Yes, it works. I think that our next EP will be fully recorded, composed and produced with Songsmith. I feel kinda useless now. Normally our songs form up from vague melodies that I whistle and hum to the rest of the guys and then let gravity do the work. Usually I also snap my fingers a lot. WHAM! has always been a great influence to us.
I'm kinda interested where this already a little phenomena will develope. We'll see.
