The Universal Language

As anyone who has known me for awhile can tell you, I have a deep love of music. I originally planned to have my career center around producing remixes for popular artists and lend my own vision to their work. If you ever visit my youtube channel you can listen to some of that work. Back in my 2^nd blog post I talked about how my brain sort of broke and how I went from one place to another in my life and one of the consequences of that journey was the hamstringing of my creativity.

Years ago I’d remix everything and anything under the sun. Virtually every new song to come out had potential to me to be transformed into an expression of my own feelings. As time went on I lost more and more of whatever that magic was that inspired me. That said I look back fondly on that time in my life and I smile when I listen to my old works. Art, in any form, whether it be music, painting, etc, always seems to touch people regardless of barriers like language, ethnicity or age. Obviously not everything appeals to everyone since we are all different, but at its core the various art forms of the world can improve us, broaden us and speak to us on a multitude of levels. I think most people can, at the very least, think of an artist whose music they’ve enjoyed and followed through many years.

Today I find great concern in the fact that our art and music educational programs often seem to be the first targets for budget cuts. Young people are losing quality education in the arts, something that could enrich their lives and inspire them to pursue artistic endeavors. I also see the music industry being transformed more and more into just another factory for mass production and selling to a public that has limited education and experience in truly appreciating fine art. Or perhaps I’m just starting to show my age? I am sure every adult at some point has realized the time of music they loved has passed and a new generation has risen along with a new style of music that they simply can’t connect with. My time was the 90’s and early 2000’s. Today I find only a few things I can connect with and perhaps that colors my views. I just feel the music industry today runs things too much like a business churning out flimsy products en masse and has lost that “heart”, that artistic soul, that goes hand in hand with creating music and sharing it with the world.

It’s not all doom and gloom mind you. There’s still a few artists even today that manage to spark those old feelings of creativity and emotion, but they are much fewer and far between. I believe part of that is the lack of quality arts education that young people have access to these days. For that matter even academic education seems lacking but that’s a topic for another blog entirely. All in all I urge anyone reading to really pay attention to what’s going on in your community regarding arts programs in education. Don’t let the “corner cutters” remove or even shortchange art and music from your family’s lives. Artistic expression is just as important, if not more so, as making money.