Hello World - The Meaning Behind The Title Of This Blog

             For most of my childhood I was surrounded by music. At age three I started going to music school and fighting off the other kids to make sure I had the rainbow colored guitar strap. Mind you; none of us three to five year olds were really playing these instruments. We were in fact having playtime with instruments while our parents enjoyed an hour or so socializing with their contemporaries.

            Ever since that guitar strap I was always making sure that the things I wanted in my life were the cool and hip things that everyone yearned for. As I grew older I continued to go to music schools and in sixth grade I started to take the guitar a little more seriously than I had previously. But being the serious, hardcore, “know it all,” rocker that most middle school boys are, I turned my head to anything that did not have huge guitar parts and awesome solos. Approaching high school I quickly learned that my friends didn’t have the same appreciation for that kind of music I was listening to and I wondered why. As I journeyed through the first two years of high school I quickly realized that 60’s, 70’s and 80’s rock wasn’t all that “cool” anymore. As a musician and music lover the music of the past, that music still spoke to me more than anything, but all my friends were listening to pop music. And in middle school and high school, artistry was often trumped by social relationships. This point is something I will refer back to. Led Zepplin and Clapton were not as cool as the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and NSYNC. These pop stars were the new rock stars of the day and I couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was the times just changing? But I’ve come to realize it was a huge combination of things. So huge were the forces at play in the music industry and internet age that it would take me to studying music at the collegiate level to fully appreciate the changing environment that I was hoping to be a part of. Technology was bringing forth new ways to distribute music. Technology was creating new types of instruments that could be played with computer keyboards. And, like most industries, there was a new generation of talent ready to fuse new and evolving elements together. All these new technological advances, people, and sounds were the stepping-stones for what popular music is today.

            As I will continue to post in this blog I will address topics such as: who are the major influencers in modern day popular music, what new technology has done for creating popular music, how technology has changed the way we make, hear and distribute music etc.

            Everyone wants that thing. Everyone wants to have discovered a feeling, a product or sound that will affect the masses. Popular music can make us feel cool because of our deep personal relationship to sound coupled with our recognition of similarity in taste with others.  Everyone wants to have the Rainbow Guitar strap. It’s something that no matter how hard you try to avoid or scoff at it’s going to find it’s way to your ears and get stuck in your head. Just like anything, popular music will always be changing but it’s always going to be that rainbow colored guitar strap that everyone wants a piece of.