Elton and the Internet

I've been an Elton John fan since the early 70s and learned to sing by imitating his voice while playing along to his songs. Now Sir Elton would like to do away with the Internet, temporarily at least. According to an article in The Sun, Elton would like to shut down the Internet for 5 years as an experiment to see what kind of art would be produced, intimating that the music nowadays is of poor quality as a result of everyone being online. He feels that music was of better quality in the early 70s than today and that musicians need to interact more instead of blogging.

I do feel that mainstream music in the 70s was better than today. It was a different world and there was no World Wide Web with the incredible media fragmentation and diversity we have today. Part of my admitted bias stems from the fact I am a progressive rock fan and that in the 70s, progressive rock was indeed part of the mainstream. It's sometimes amazing for me to remember but Yes and ELP played to huge audiences and had albums in the top 10. There was also your jazz rock and fusion folks like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever who redefined jazz in a rock context. At any rate, there was mainstream music (i.e. on the radio and put out by the major labels) that had a fair degree of musical sophistication.

Even Elton John himself had "proggy" tendencies, witness "Funeral for a Friend" and the "Carla/Etude/Fanfare" from The Fox. But even his "standard" pop music fare was beautifully conceived and executed, particularly with the perfectionistic approach of Gus Dudgeon.

I would have to disagree with Elton though that there's not as much good music today. There's just so much more out there via the Internet that it can be too overwhelming to discover it. I don't feel the major labels and conventional radio have much too offer anymore. But boy, in my networking on MySpace, I've found scores of excellent bands and musicians! Most don't have any major label support, let alone ANY label support. But you could check out some of my "friends" at the Aethellis MySpace page and find a great deal of quality music ranging from ambient electronica to classical to jazz to progressive.

Elton admits to being a "Luddite" but has his music available for download and had his 60th birthday concert streamed over the Internet. But as far as using computers to compose, he would rather stick to the piano. And that's fine. For me, writing at the piano enabled me to remember what I composed better than improvising into a sequencer program on the computer or recording to tape. I had to go back and play things over to really commit my new piece to memory. And sometimes that made me work on it more and develop it better.

That said, sequencers and software enable me to create pretty much any sound I want and do the "one man band" thing. It also allows me to try things out to see how they might sound and then cut and paste. This can be a good thing. But as Elton pointed out, collaboration with other people (not over the Internet but live) can be lead to interesting music; a way to bounce ideas off of each other. Both approaches are valid and indeed there are those who have little in the way of conventional musical ability who are able to create interesting music because of the technology.

So I must say Sir Elton, there is an abundance of creativty and great music out there on the Internet, you just have to look. Many excellent musicians and bands would have been unheard otherwise. So please, let's not shut it all down, but rather explore it! I'm so glad I discovered you all those years ago and there are others out there online who deserve to be discovered as well.