Freedom through limitation - Billy Childish talks of music.

Music, like all art, is something best done because you love to do it, not because you want a career in television. Music that matters is music of the heart. You have to try to be authentic. Hiding behind technology does not equal sophistication. Recording for the corporate music industry and owning a mansion does not equal success, and stupefying people with volume does not equal power. I advocate mono over stereo. Stereo, after all, is only a gimmick based on the idea that, as we have two ears, we can have two speakers and flog twice as much junk to the mugs.

The valve is also preferable to the transistor. The transistor is superior to digital. Analogue recording is better than DAT. Analogue gives character to sound and DAT destroys it. Digital recording has been hyped so as to flatter the egos of the witless into believing they need to be able to hear a mouse fart on The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s album (which, incidentally, is the Beatles’ worst LP, not their best). The most authentic recording ever was made in a field on a wax cylinder, or on a cassette player in somebody’s kitchen. Chart music is not the recording of an event, but a synthetic commodity produced in the same manner as a factory sausage. This kind of plasticizing of life destroys the roots of what makes music worth having in the first place.

A synthesized bassoon is only meaningful as a substitute for a real one. The remastering, remixing and digital enhancing of old recordings is pathetic. One of the arguments used to validate this practice is that early recording artists did not have the benefit of more modern recording techniques. Applying the same argument to art, I suggest that all of Van Gogh’s paintings should be sanded down and redone with an airbrush. A painter can be cack-handed and not obsessed with showing off and still be taken seriously. Yet in pop culture only one standard “studio” style of recording is deemed permissible. If we take sound to be the musical equivalent of colour, then Eurobeige is the only pigment allowed.

I call for the banning of music in all pubs, shopping arcades and lifts. And the provision of a blank CD in jukeboxes. To write important songs you've got to be unafraid of being unimportant. It is possible to record on modern equipment but you need more discipline than with the old gear, and people have none. The reason that contemporary music sounds as if it was a shit that took half a year to squat out is because it is. Billy Childish 28 January 03