Your Music Sucks And No One Likes You

By: Pierce Porterfield

Surprise! It’s hard to “make it” as a musician. If you’ve been paying any attention to  the music world, you may notice that the biggest factor driving popularity is originality. With originality comes style, with style comes look. From Mac Demarco to Taylor Swift, every popular artist has a look, a style, an * A`ES~TH`ET~I`C *. 

You may ask “Yeah but shouldn't it be all about the music?” Music and Image form one complete experience of your art. Musicians don’t haphazardly vomit out sound. They embody the sound, they are the sound, and they should visually represent what their music means. This creates a musical brand that is consistent and effective. So how does this relate to you, the starving artist handing out your mixtape via street corner? 

Your music sucks

Sure you can proficiently play an instrument, but what you do with that instrument is just uninspired. You aren’t pulling from anywhere inside yourself. You’re hearing other sounds, saying I want to do that, and then copy and pasting. That’s wrong. When you see a successful band it is tempting to analyze and quantify what they do, and try to insert your own slightly altered pieces into the blank spaces of the template. 

Don’t. 

You don’t have to go to a chorus because that’s what other songs do. You don’t have to have a chorus. There doesn’t have to be a guitar in this song. Quit worrying about what you think makes a real song. Just make a song, let yourself shine through, play with new ideas, experiment with new trains of thought. No one wants to hear what they’ve already heard before. They want to hear a new sound, something that stands out. They want to connect with YOU. 

“But how do I add myself to my music?”

TAKE A CHANCE

It should be about how you channel and refine that inspiration into an expression of YOU . If you like Led Zeppelin don’t just make what Led Zeppelin made. Pick their music apart and integrate it into yourself.

Your album art is awful

Why the hell are you putting a black and white picture of yourself with an acoustic guitar on your album cover? Is that all the depth there is to the music? Is that all of the effort you put into your project? You spend all this time creating music, and when it comes time to visually represent it, the best image you have is a cheesy senior portrait.

I am shocked by the number of senior portrait albums that get sent to KCOU. Please do something else if you want to even look like you’re trying. Your album design puts a face to your work, and the listener visualizes it when they talk about your album with other people. A visual that works in tandem with a work is much more effective and creates a multi-sensory experience. 

Have some style

Be yourself 

Be memorable

The artist makes an impact on the listener, and influences their experience of the music. If you hate Kanye West but love his music, that has an impact on the way you listen to him. He becomes a larger than life mythological being. You hear him on a track, you see his face, his fashion, his public shenanigans, and you can’t help but indulge. It’s interesting to you in a voyeuristic way. Nobody wants to listen to John “Vanilla” Smith rap “Power-” it would fall flat without the context of the artist

You can’t be Kanye West, but the good news is you don’t have to be Kanye West. Look at mildly famous College Radio type artists and you’ll notice that they emit some kind of interesting style. People lacking the ability to express themselves via style usually lack the chops to channel that expression into other forms. 

If you do you feel like you can express yourself but you have a problem channeling it, maybe you're doing too much. A lot of people try to over complicate their style, and it ends up coming off as disingenuous. People can spot that a mile away. Save for Iggy Azalea who somehow slipped under everyones radar until she was already famous. 

Sometimes you need to simplify and just get to the core of who you are. For example, let's say that you are a scattered person, terribly disorganized, always day dreaming, always forgetting things; there is no need to fix yourself for your music (or any form of self expression). You should be representing what and who you are. Don’t try and organize your music because you think it’s what people want, you suck at that, it won’t be any good. Whatever parts of you that you can make shine through are going to be the most raw. No one wants a watered down, processed version of you. It’s bland and it probably tastes like other things they’ve already had. There’s such a wide variety of tastes in this world that no matter how extreme the real you tastes, someone will enjoy it. Hell things can taste good just because you’ve never tasted them before. It’s the experience of something new that can give the biggest rush to content consumers. So again- why take a black and white picture of you and your acoustic guitar? Why is that the only flavor your music represents? Why is that all you can think of? Are you making things yourself or are you pulling from a template? 

Who is this prick?

I’ve gone through several spells of making awful music. In no way am I successful or established, but I feel like I’ve grown a lot, and that’s why I think I’ve earned the right to act like I have some understanding of self expression.

Lately, however, I feel like I’ve unlocked things for myself. I’m not just hurling music out onto the internet. I’m not playing into what feels expected of me, and I actually like what I’m doing a lot more. I want to try and share my realizations in order to unlock someone else's self understanding. This might not unlock things for you, but maybe at least you now know the lock exists. Maybe you’ll find solace in the fact that someone else has felt insanely frustrated about making something that they don’t actually like. If you take away one thing let it be this clichéd expression: Be yourself.