Cry for Help

Instruments are nothing new. They’re not some sort of fad created by the media to spur sales, and they’ve never been flashy beyond their means. Cavemen discovered the first instruments by hitting sticks on rocks to a beat, thus proving that humans were never satisfied with the instrument that comes built into them, their voice. While the voice is most certainly a bona fide instrument, it is very different from other instruments. Others, like the guitar, piano, saxophone, or flute, become a musician’s right hand man. They give comfort to an otherwise insecure artist, and are capable of explaining everything that cannot be explained with the spoken word alone. Artists like Jimi Hendrix, seen by many as the greatest guitar player to ever grace the Earth, often seemed awkward and incapable of stringing together complete thoughts with just words alone. Put a guitar in his hand, however, and he was capable of explaining everything from why our hearts beat red with love to what alien life forms would think of our current-day planet. When an artist finds their instrument, it becomes an extension of their brain, and it is able to pick up the slack when our brains reach their creative limitations. They have always been popular in music, reaching a height in the 1960s-1980s with the use of the electric guitar, which spurred the number of people learning to play guitars and other instruments exponentially as they looked up to their idols on stage. But as society “advanced,” as the world turned, and as the musicians grew older, something odd began to happen. If you were to look around the music scene today, you’d see something disheartening to say the least: musicians are abandoning their instruments.

One might not notice this strange phenomenon right away. Television commercials and print ads alike still show popular current artists holding guitars or sitting at grand pianos, often glaring into them as if trying to figure out how to speak their mystifying language. This is because artists like Gaga, Beiber, and others still love the image of instruments, just not the application of them. When you look at a musician without an instrument, it’s like looking at a soldier without a gun, a priest without a Bible, or a businessman without his briefcase.  Once in concert, however, all of these artists tend to pass the actual music-playing to an in-house band, as if handing off the dirty work to a few musical peasants.

The truth is musical talent is not what gets musicians popular anymore.  In its place is a whole list of other things ranging from merchandise to flashy music videos.  It is a vicious cause and effect cycle, as the people become less and less interested in instruments, less and less kids start picking these instruments up to learn them. This creates a huge lack of talent in the musical pool, and the population becomes even less interested in talent, as there simply is none to be found. Older artists used to become famous because the world loved musical talent. One’s measure of success used to be who could shred the fastest or rock the hardest, but now it is who can sell the most single-song downloads in a day. So this is a true test for humanity, and a true cry for help from people who are madly in love with music: we need a true musical hero to rise from the ashes and conquer today’s scene. Bring it back to what it once was, just with a modern theme.  The world does not need to see another soldier going into battle without knowing how to work a gun.

“Music is an expression of self, but it’s becoming an expression of wealth”