I hate political music. It's almost always crappy-sounding, plus the politics are despicable 99.999% of the time. (The other 0.001% of the time, the song is "Way Out Here" by Josh Thompson. That song's awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0sYnro_3Rc)

But at the same time, I have trouble seeing the point of just making music for the sake of giving people something nice to listen to. I have a blossoming career and a growing family, so even my available time for thinking about things has to be carefully prioritized.

This means I have become very pointed in my songwriting. I find things that I want to comment on and I try to give my unique thoughts about them. Often they're things I have not seen any other musicians talking about: the complacency with which we introduce more and more technology into our lives; the mysterious sacredness we give to the words of journalists; the parallels between how victory and self-respect are won on an interpersonal level and on an international level; the way our perception of our childhood heroes changes and often sours as we age; and so on. (These are all things I've written songs about.)

Has anyone else--especially those of you with day jobs and families--had a similar experience?

For those of you who write music without lyrics, how do you get across messages you think are important?

I hate political music.

Remind me never to share my music collection with you.

the complacency with which we introduce more and more technology into our lives; the mysterious sacredness we give to the words of journalists; the parallels between how victory and self-respect are won on an interpersonal level and on an international level; the way our perception of our childhood heroes changes and often sours as we age

Has anyone else--especially those of you with day jobs and families--had a similar experience?

For those of you who write music without lyrics, how do you get across messages you think are important?

I treat my music and my politics separately, for the most part. I already divide my time between making music and activism, so music tends to be my break from or my answer to the sort of social and existential crises that I deal with. I make music for people to dance to - and while I wouldn't say I'll never write a political song I think I enjoy music more when it's more raw emotion or energy. As far as getting across messages, it's not like you don't have a platform as an artist to speak your mind on things that are important to you. People don't need to listen to my music to know who I'm voting for in the election, they can just look at my twitter feed. I'm not shy about expressing my views.

Of course, I also think political music serves a really important role. It's just best suited for people who make music based on their feelings of anger (activist punks are the best punks); nuanced politics doesn't fit with the primal nature of music in my opinion.

Now that I'm thinking of it, visuals help as well. These days, everyone has a visual that accompanies the music. Just look at SoundCloud. If you don't have an image, no one seems to care about your music. But somehow having a 200x200 picture and a cover background helps get your message across.

That's an interesting point. The technology we use to share and listen to music (starting with MTV or maybe earlier and continuing through to Soundcloud and beyond) has created this situation where music ain't nothin' if there's no visuals. This probably filters out musicians who aren't visual or who don't work with visual people.

BTW, are there any famous pop musicians who've risen to fame in the last 20 years who are blind? I can't name a single one, and once Stevie Wonder dies I won't be able to name any who are alive.

BTW, are there any famous pop musicians who've risen to fame in the last 20 years who are blind? I can't name a single one, and once Stevie Wonder dies I won't be able to name any who are alive.

I actually have no idea The only blind artist that I can name aside from Stevie Wonder is Ray Charles.

My job doesn't quite conflict with my music like yours does,

I've been thinking for a little while now about whether it might be possible to combine my music with my public speaking. Making the music relevant to what I'm speaking about wouldn't be hard (some of it already is), and I'm certain that the music could add something to make a greater whole instead of just being a gimmick tacked on to a presentation. I'm also certain that it could be feasible--e.g. for a conference to have me as a speaker and know that as part of my talk (or maybe as a separate second talk) I'd also have my band up on stage and we'd perform, with all the additional requirements for gear etc. This would be pretty novel and might be interesting to a lot of people in my field.

But I'm not sure about whether it would work on a comprehension level. People might ultimately get confused about whether they were going to see me talk or see my band play, and people would end up deciding they like one or the other but not both.

So there were plenty of times that went through my mind, that I could be helping the world, using strong understanding of theoretical physics to better humankind, or help people in research, or just learn ways to make lives better,

This could be its own thread, but what's up with people in EDM and theoretical physics? It's like "A Brief History of Time" is required reading for you guys! I'm friends with a couple guys who are actual physicists and neither of them listen to or produce EDM, so it doesn't appear to go both ways...just kinda something funny I noticed.

Anyway, do you have an actual professional background in theoretical physics? It wasn't clear from your comment.

And I know even in a post-apocalyptic situation, if they were to have to decide to certain people to help survive, I wouldn't get thrown in that bunker because a musician can't help grow food, or make medicine. So in that sense I still feel the empty push of humanities needs against what I want, but I still do it, because I enjoy it and it doesn't have a negative effect on me or anyone else....Aaaand I'm rambling. I'll just end this here.

I think the post-apocalyptic bunker is a good thought experiment, a good way to think about the value of what we're doing, rather than just the quality of it. We could even derive the terms "intrabunker activities" and "extrabunker activities" to delineate the things we do that we think are important and the things we do just because we enjoy them and they don't hurt anyone.

Anyway, do you have an actual professional background in theoretical physics? It wasn't clear from your comment.

I do not technically have a professional degree or anything, so for obvious reasons I can't really say I am a theoretical physicist. I'm only 18, so haven't really been through college, but after I go to Digipen to study art and more specifically video game art, I plan on somewhat later finding a college to study theoretical physics, but I know I can and do have a natural talent for understanding it. I've read and studied papers and courses since I was 11-12 because of my huge interest, mostly including papers by Michio Kaku, Brian Wetch, Ashoke Sen, Peter Higgs, Max Planck, and a couple more whose names I forget. (terribly bad with names)

I think the post-apocalyptic bunker is a good thought experiment, a good way to think about the value of what we're doing, rather than just the quality of it. We could even derive the terms "intrabunker activities" and "extrabunker activities" to delineate the things we do that we think are important and the things we do just because we enjoy them and they don't hurt anyone.

I kind of got the idea from a movie "After the Dark." Whole idea of the movie is the thought experiment you just said. The movie does kind of give a comforting reason to keep a musician, but efficiency was not the purpose then. Good watch.

As a non-heterosexual man, I don't think if I want to know your opinion on gay marriage or your reasoning if it's something that is "thought-policed". 

No "general discussion" so don't worry, I won't get into it. (At least I'll say this: the "thought police" aren't actually protecting anyone, gay or otherwise.) But I will repeat: if I were to tell you my position, you'd think it was very nuanced and sophisticated, while to me it springs in a very straightforward way from just a few very clear beliefs. Nuance is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes it goes the other way: sometimes the individual personally thinks his views are very nuanced while to outsiders they look very simple.

It's an interesting question, but not one I think should be tested in a realm as contested as politics. There are plenty of complicated concepts and ideas that would be much less polarizing and much more enlightening we could use. Inspiring intellectual curiosity, for example. Or hell, just teaching people math and physics.

I agree, it would be difficult to test because political ideas are so polarizing, and this would always introduce bias (not to mention selection problems) into the experiment. Math and physics wouldn't be better though, since only a small percentage of people even think about those topics and an even smaller percentage actually know what they're talking about. Plus, as I mentioned to someone else in this thread, the people who are interested in those topics seem to be very unevenly distributed across genre audiences.

Ultimately if what we're interested in is the question "How capable are various audiences at handling nuanced messages in the music they listen to?" with the implied question "How nuanced can the messages in your music get and still be effective?" then it seems like political questions are the place to focus, since A) there is a wide range of nuance-level in political messages (as opposed to, say, love messages) and B) nearly all genres contain artists who attempt to convey those messages. You'd just have to be careful and non-judgmental as you design and conduct the experiment.

Woahhh maaaann

Yeah, I deal with people like that a lot, especially a good portion of my family, but nah, I honestly love to read academic papers, always found knowing about how the universe's mechanics work was very intriguing. I'm not going to lie and act like I understand every single formula, but over the years I have come to understand a good deal of the mathematics and different theories in the papers I've read.

Interesting, I'll check it out

Definitely should, I think it's a good movie, maybe just a tad bit 2-dimensional at very little moments if anything.