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I had this idea for leaving leaflets and pamphlets in the racks they have at doctors surgeries/bus stations/offices etc. Anywhere that any sort of general interest reading material gets put. It would be a sort of basic introduction to quitting your job and starting a fulfilling life. With tips and general advice on what to do instead, where to find local help, how to figure out your passions/skills. Aimed purely at people who already hate what they do but don't have the balls to find something they'd prefer. So i wrote the introduction and i was wondering about other content and what, if anything, would need changing.

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So you open your head and all this nonsense comes shooting out of it. Shocked and stupid and unable to exist in a space where it does not have a way to explain itself. It's all the little bits and pieces of every time you've shrugged your shoulders and said "nothing really" whenever anyone has asked you what is wrong. It's every wave of rage you repressed because you've had to smile and pretend to be part of the gang when you know that everything the gang represents just seems wrong to you. It's keeping your head down for a slice of the quiet life. It's the little bit of time before going to bed on a night when you say "Tomorrow i'll just stay in bed." But you know you're going to be there like always.

These pieces aren't you.

Do you remember the days when you swore those pieces would never be you? And yet here they are lying on the desk in a ball of blood and brain matter, nodes and rods and cones sprayed across the cheap vinyl worktop as though your head began to reject your inconsistent and ungrateful imagination.

SNAP! Your vision reels itself back in and slaps you between the eyes and you remember that you're sitting at a desk in a urine coloured office surrounded by thirty other people who feel exactly the same way. The radio might as well be yawning for all the good it's doing, the beat matching up perfectly with the ticking clock smirking at you out of the corner of your eye.

This is the point where you will decide the entire course of your life. This is the bit where you will make up your mind who you are for the rest of your days. Is it really such a difficult decision? You know deep down what the correct answer is, and it is so blindingly obvious that you cannot ignore it any longer. This time will be the last time you get to choose. This will be the final chance. Do you want to sit and daydream about having a life that at least seems like it's worth living? Or do you sit out the rest of your sentence? Let's make a list of pro's and con's shall we?

Reasons why you should stay.

Number one. Your partner won't start shouting at you for being irresponsible.
Two. Your parents will be proud of you for sticking with it.
Three. You'll fit in nicely with everyone else. Because no-one really likes work do they? I mean that's why they call it work. You're not supposed to enjoy it. It's just a thing you have to do to be able to make it in this world and call yourself a responsible adult. A grown up.

Cons.
One. You will hate yourself for the rest of your life for not having the guts to do what you actually wanted to do with your life. Whatever that might be. At least you'd be free to travel, for example. Or write that book you're always talking about writing. Or taking that year to teach English in Japan. Or playing music to anyone who'll listen.
Two. You will always regret not taking this opportunity.
Three. You will always know that the people who love you now, truly love and care about you, don't love you for who you are. They love you for your salary and your career prospects. They are proud of the job title. They are happy because you are fitting in nicely, and you're so well adjusted. Thank the stars that you're not interesting or eccentric in any way. That might make you stand out from the crowd.

Are you not taking that step just because you're scared to be yourself? Or are you scared that other people will hate the real you?

Then again, if you're only in it for other people's opinions then there's really not much that I could say that is going to help anyway. Your mind has been made up, and unfortunately not by you.

Just supposing that you do take the chance to be completely and utterly yourself, not bowing to anyone else's demands, or for anyone else's approval. I mean what's the worst that happens? You quit, walk out and give yourself an honest go at life. You have some fun, things don't work out and you get yourself another job. You learn your lesson and everything goes back to normal. But you have to have a go, right?

So what do YOU want to do?"

Any suggestions/advice...? I don't know if there's already threads about this, but i thought since it was a new project a new thread would be best.

Pop music is not written by musicians or songwriters.

Now, that being the main gist of the piece, i feel i need to clarify a few points before you go all dissapproving on me.

Pop music or Popular Music to use it's old timey name, was a genre named and created as a catchall term for music that was easy to enjoy. The sort of unassuming, non-threatening, mild mannered material that can be played anywhere at any time and offend only a minority of people. Anything that gets into the top 40 can be classified as pop music. Yes, Limp Bizkit, and now Rage against the Machine are Pop music, as is Eminem, Marilyn Manson, The Offspring. Anyone sufficiently popular to be counted on the Pop chart, becomes pop music.

Pop music is a pigeon holey sort of a term, that can encompass many many different things, whilst being nothing at all in fact. Ask someone to define a pop music record and you will get hundreds of different responses, most of them drawing attention to style, structure and lyrical content. Rap became Pop when people realised you could make money from it. Rap Metal became pop once people realised you could make money from it. Any genre you care to mention, if people have discovered that there is significant money to be made from it, and produces it to fit a certain style, becomes pop. Groups like REM and Maroon 5, though at completely opposite ends of the blandness scale, are essentially the same genre. Inoffensive songs about being in love with someone, the world being difficult, things getting you down, looking at the good things. Pop music.

Musicians and song writers are artists essentially. There is a great deal of difference between a song writer and a singer. A song writer has spent possibly years of their life working on their craft, building and composing music that they will be able to market to people. (Because it is a business once you get to the stage of selling it). Singers however, have (possibly) a good voice, some sort of saleable appearance...and that's it. They go through vocal training and learn to use their voice "correctly" and are brought on board a musical project in the same way a spokesperson is brought on board an advertising campaign. They are essentially the salespeople for the song. The song is the commodity, and they are selling it to you.

When i say that they learn to use their voice correctly i am of course being "sarcastic". It occurs to me that you could turn on any radio station anywhere in the country and hear the same song, the same vocal style, the same musical arrangement, but a completely different artist. The commodification of music has sucked all the soul out of it. Because it has become a business, they have streamlined and commercialised it. So there is no room for experimentation in Pop. No time for long instrumental pieces. They are selling you a product, and the way they can do that most easily is with "singers" preferably these days, singers that ordinary people can relate to. One of the most important rules in sales is that of relating to your customer.

Because they have "streamlined" and "downsized" their business, there is only room for standardised products. There can be no factory seconds, and so any stench of difference is cleansed to within an inch of its life, lest it affect sales. Standardisation is the name of the game now. And with standardisation comes mediocrity, banality, lack of thought or imagination and a deadening of the product, so much so that the industry itself blames its own demise on the consumers for not consuming enough. Never mind the fact that the songs are all sounding vaguely exactly the same now, or that you could swing a cat in a tv studio and hit someone who has released an album or a single. It's obviously the audience that are doing it wrong. The method cannot possibly fail. It's obviously the case that the people who the music is made for are wrong.

They say that the internet is killing the music industry. That people aren't spending enough money on albums. It couldn't possibly be that the music being played on the radio and on the tv is by someone with no discernible talent of their own (save for the fact that they can hold a note or two), and that these ten a penny "singers" are springing up in literal droves on the internet, some even better than those that do make songs that get into the charts. In my opinion the internet is saving music, and reviving the ghost of what was once a great industry, before the big companies came in and removed any trace of creativity or originality. It's just that now the big companies can't hack it in the competitive market, they're crying out that the new way isn't fair. That they hadn't planned for it, and that they didn't know it could go this way. Well tough. You should have thought of that before you ruined music.

As Jello Biafra says in "MTV Get off the air" Could it be that you made one too many lousy records?

Pop music (not music that becomes defined as pop. Music that is written specifically under the heading "pop music") is written by scientists. IF you listen to any pop song on the radio now, you will find that they follow a certain formula. Every sub genre has it's own trademarks and signatures, but by and large you can basically predict how these songs go. Try it out for yourself. Find a pop song you have not heard before and see if you can tell when the chorus is coming up, when the bridge is coming up, when the solo/middle eight section is coming up and when the surging key change is coming up. These are the standard elements of the pop song, and they are ever present.

A writer of pop songs knows exactly what to put where. Popular music is popular because, like anything popular, it is safe and predictable. For some reason people really like predictability. Predictability becomes a hallmark of skill and talent. These people are basically taking the equation for a song, fitting the melody, the tempo, the key around this skeletal structure, finding a singer that suits the style and putting out the songs. They are not creating anything artistic, anymore than i am performing mathematical calculations by writing the numbers one to fifty in ascending order.

Me and my brother were sitting watching TV and flicking through the music channels, when we saw this tv ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lQyv9zUlIg

Quite sobering, if ultimately impotent. Just as we were saying that it would probably do no good, this second ad came on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP7BlzMk2s8

Surely there is something not quite right about this. Unless it was a very cleverly constructed artistic statement, allowed on only in the early hours when those who would understand the clash would be at their most lucid.

Or they're thick as fuck. But that can't be right...