Do I Need To Know About Music If I Want To Write About It?
Somehow everyone likes Music, but simultaneously we canāt agree on what music we like. So what is it that weāre all in agreement about liking? This makes for a strange bit of sociology in terms of how music is approached and talked about. Since music has this odd type of universality itās seeped deep into our culture and our discussions of it manifest in some strange ways. My love of music, and later love for philosophy and sociology is what led me to studying why music is so universal but not agreed on for six years and two degrees.
All this time studying music has led me to what I now arrogantly believe may be one of the central contradictions of music which is that it is worthless. Iām not trying to say that itās worth is = 0 nor am I trying to misdirect with a platitude that it is āpricelessā meaning that itās worth is infinite. What I mean is that it simply cannot be defined in terms of having a worth at all. In computer terms you might consider this as being null. I donāt believe this worthlessness is necessarily bad or even good. What I do mean to point out is that it prevents us from thinking clearly about the role of music. When considering we live in a capitalist hellscape this provides a problem because we canāt assign its value at āinfiniteā nor can we value it at ā0ā. This is what I think leads to the never ending arguments surrounding the worth of music, musicians, their work.
Before I go on, I should make this clear: I support every musician in their right to get paid. I wrote my Masterās thesis on the labour rights of musicians and how they are abused. However I have a utopian vision where all music is free for everyone. That vision doesnāt jive with our world and until we have some massive societal revolution, musicians gotta eat and we have to play by the rules of capital for now.
The most frustrating way that this valuelessness manifests is that knowledge about music, be it music theory, music history, sociology of music, whatever, is always valued as a secondary skill even in the industries and structures built around music (I pause here again to remind people that Iām a recovering academic writing blogs on Tumblr, what Iām about to describe is personal, Iām mad about it, maybe thatās improper or biased but itās how I understand my own experiences). Let me give you a few examples.
After entering the hell of the job market with two music degrees I was encountered with a great deal of false hope. There were actually fairly frequent job postings in or around the āmusic industriesā. This was great for living in a small city, albeit one with a rich musical history. What quickly hit me though is that despite all these music jobs no one was actually looking for anyone who knew anything about music. Go ahead and search āmusicā on a job board, most of the jobs listed will not have ārequires a knowledge of music or musical backgroundā unless youāre teaching (Iāll get to this later). Most jobs in music require marketing, business, social media, administration, event planning, etc. Whats more they require experience in those fields so they are not open to most musicians or people who have dedicated their time to the actual music. I donāt mean to downplay those skills or say they are not relevant, I do mean to say that any actual knowledge of music is rarely prioritized. Of course people with passion for music are attracted to these positions but they can also become bloated with people who enjoy music passively. I guess the issue there is that I donāt know a single person who doesnāt enjoy music.
At this point youāre probably shrugging off my frustration as an idiot who thought studying music instead of literally anything else would help me get employed in music. Well youāre right I am frustrated because even the people I know with music degrees who work in music had to get a second degree or diploma unrelated to music to get that job. You might also say āwell there are people who write about music who get hired based on their knowledge of music.ā But let me dig at that point.
As someone who keeps a close eye on these job postings I can say with relative confidence that most job postings at major music publications (I recently saw one for Stereogum) require experience in journalism first. Their interest is not in proving that you actually understand the content youāll be writing about but that youāll be able to produce content on anything. This is most clearly shown in music reviews. Take any review of a new popular album and jot down a one sentence summary of each paragraph. You donāt have to do much to see that not only do these writers bring up the same points in each review, they often do it in the same order. I donāt say this to slander journalists, I think itās a noble profession, one I donāt have the skills to do. I do this to point out that if you take an incredibly diverse set of information and give it to people who have been trained to write in a certain way, youāll get largely the same output. If you donāt, youāll encounter an editor who, having raised through the same ranks will see that it is. Of course itās not always the case that journalists get hired to write for these publications (for instance, you may just have connections) but it is very common.
I realize this comes across as arrogant and entitled but I think the question of credentials is an important one. After all, Iāve spent six years writing about music under the scrutiny of academia to be told over and over I donāt have the qualifications to write great content like āEvery Radiohead Song Rankedā because I didnāt study journalism. I hosted a campus radio show on music for four years to be told the same thing at a radio station. What seems to be happening is that obviously music is important. Weāll create an infinite amount of publications dedicated to the topic. It has worth. But itās still second to skills that have value to the institution. What I hear from people hiring in music is āOf course music is important... itās just not valuableā. My encyclopedic knowledge of music is not welcome in the working world unless itās tied to another skill that can be more efficiently employed. This is because we canāt actually place value on music the way we can on skills with more quantifiable outputs.
This brings me to education. All through my time studying music I got āso you going to be a teacher?ā it was something I found frustrating but I do love to teach so I always said āmaybeā. Well recently I figured I might as well look into teaching. Where I live, to get a teaching degree you need to have a certain amount of course hours in āteachableā subjects. Thereās band class in every school here and luckily Iāve taken a number of conducting classes and have plenty of class hours in music. When looking at the list of subjects considered āteachableā one has an asterisk next to it. It turns out music can only be your āsecondaryā teachable meaning you have to have majored in another topic and maybe minored in music. I talk to teachers I know in the province and they say that there are barely any music teachers and they regularly have to try and recruit from outside the province. I called one of the univeristies in my area and they assured me that my masters degree was not applicable and that I canāt even apply to be a teacher with only music credits. What I love about this is that I, as arrogant as it may sound, almost certainly know more about music than anyone teaching it in my province (there is a small program at my alma matter that gives degrees in āmusic educationā but having spent a good deal of time with those people Iām not too worried about competition). More people would have education degrees not from the music education program and instead would all have music as a āsecondaryā. Meanwhile Iām not even eligible to enter most of the teaching programs here at all.
While this article certainly comes off as the complaints of a dumbass, I think thereās an importance in asking these questions. If you decide to pursue the knowledge of music academically, why is that so often viewed as a bonus to a primary knowledge? Why are our priorities in the music world on non-musical skill sets and knowledge, even in careers that are concerned with music knowledge like teaching and music writing? I donāt think itās anything to do with the well meaning people Iāve thrown under the bus here and everything to do with our way of measuring value. Or better, our deep inability to deal with things that canāt have value assigned to them. Consider also that every LP when it came out was sold for the same price, but immediately some of them became collectable and would exponentially increase in value while others you would struggle to give away. The universality of price of a new LP in the 60s, a new CD in the 90s or an iTunes single in the 00s was because we just canāt place a value on its contents so we had to concede that every song is worth $0.99. Because a good deal of my identity and work has been put into understanding music now my skill set and that of others is in a weird non-value. Afterall everyone loves music, whatās so special about me?
