>On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, John Thornton wrote:
>
> > This misses the point. Music is not about technology. Was Woody Guthrie
> > kicking himself thinking "damn I wish I could mix more sound effects into
> > my stuff"?
>
>Were you one of those people who booed when Dylan went on stage with
>an electric guitar? Music and technology are inextricably linked. Even
>Guthrie depended on the existence of woodworking and metalworking
>technologies! There's less of a distinction between Guthrie and
>industrial pop bands like Nine Inch Nails than you assume: both
>genres are techno-cultural products of their times.
>
>Miles
Here you seem to be arguing that the electric guitar is not fundamentally different from an acoustic, which I believe, when the comment I typed above was in concerns to computers. I don't give a damn if Dylan played a Ukulele but to state that computers give people the option of "a hundred tracks...[and] dozens of effects" and that this is creatively better and more democratic is mistaken in my opinion. Buy a computer or buy a guitar, people make music if they want to. One acquisition is not inherently more democratic than the other. I do not see the great creative differences unleashed. It is really as much or more of an opportunity for people to learn less about music and how to create and understand it because they rely on technology. I seriously doubt society will look at the person who devotes a lifetime to learning to play the guitar as well as they can as being equally musically accomplished as a person who mixes sounds on a keyboard. Maybe it will happen but I doubt it. When I went to see Billy Bragg a few years back there was much more of a light show and a bigger musical accompaniment than I had remembered from previous shows yet the song that moved people the most was Bragg doing Dick Gaughans "World Turned Upside Down" on an acoustic guitar by himself on stage. I would argue that almost all the technological puffery is merely a distraction from the task of making music. Distribution is another thing altogether. Anything that reduces the costs of doing the recording and its dissemination is certainly more democratic. What this comes down to in essence is the necessity and pace of technology. Aside from the prohibitive costs of instruments 400 years ago do we really believe that when the technical progress of instrumentation was infinitely slower than it is today that music sucked because of it? That technological innovation is necessary for the creation of good music? This is the only point I'm arguing.