Create something FFS!

What a world we are living in atm…

The world is slowly getting sick… Those who aren’t getting sick are locked up in their rooms spraying hand sanitiser surrounded by a fort of toilet paper… The pm is yelling at us like our dad just caught us having a dart behind the shed before school and for some reason, social media is firing up over mis-information spread by people who watched one too many youtube videos about influenza ignoring the facts being handed to you on a plate…

This isn’t the worst thing though…

Australia has been stripped of its arts industry and has left hundreds of thousands of creatives to fend for themselves on Australia’s welfare system… (seriously… good luck with that!).

We all know what is going on in the world with CoVID19 so I am not going to dive into this with yet another post about it BUT it is highlighting something that has been going on for an extremely long time and demonstrating that it is a problem that is getting worse. That is the mindless following of trends and the stripping of creation…

Take for example…

TikTok is a pop-culture platform that has a bunch of tween’s (and a scary amount creepy dad’s) doing random dances and actions to music or sound-bites applied in the background… When the user’s video takes off, someone put’s “#challenge” at the bottom and a few hundred thousand people do the exact same thing essentially covering the previous person’s actions in the hope they to, can get a few hundred thousand juicy likes and shares… People everywhere are flocking to this platform to copy other peoples work in the hope to get “Tik-Tok Famous” and it is generating a generation of people copying other peoples actions in order to gain popularity…

Now… This isn’t a new concept. It has actually been happening in music since the dawn of time. Musicians develop their skills playing other artists music, sometimes form a band with there friends who like the same music and play a few gig’s at a pub smashing out the same 20-30 songs everyone hears weekend after weekend and gets “local famous”. Sometimes, like in the case of every artist that has entered X-Factor/Australian Idol/The Voice etc… You cover a song so well, it takes off and you enter the world of the professional music industry bypassing the normal “struggle-street” approach but very rarely does this translate into a successful career. Except in the case of Daryl Braithwaite… (argh… no… I won’t ride that horse in this article…)

So what is this doing to the music industry?!?

Strangely enough… It is doing quite a bit of good… (You thought I was going to fly off there didn’t you!?)…

Being in a cover band or playing the occasional cover in your set is paying homage to the artists that wrote it. Like they say, duplication is the best form of flattery and in this case, musicians have all honed their crafts growing up and jamming on other peoples music so why would it ever be a bad thing!?

The only thing I can say that is negative about it all is creatives around the world are getting sucked into the habit of following trends and expressing themselves before they research fact or find alternative. 

There is a plethora of ORIGINAL content out there dying to be discovered and PLENTY of room for more to be generated. It is easy to copy someone else, it’s NOT easy to create something new…

With all the craziness going on in the world, you have been given a gift being trapped at home with your instruments. It is time to lock yourselves at home (Seriously… #StayTheFuckAtHome), learn a few new chords and modes and then create! Write something new! Write a whole F$&king Album!! Do something CREATIVE and NEW with this time! 

Please don’t take all this time off and complain about the world or just live-stream the same covers over and over because you are trying to stay “relevant” or “active”… Give the world a gift of NEW MUSIC and get that shit out there once all these restrictions are lifted!

PLEASE!!!!

With all of that… Wash your damn hands… Don’t buy more than you need… Stay the F%&K at home!!

Shade out…