This is part of an informal series which I started yesterday to discuss & encourage musical ideas at Daily Kos, both as community recreation & as tools for social change.
During the months when the SOPA/PIPA fight began shifting into high gear, the ugly reality of the RIAA's fascistic, Luddite agenda hit home for me hard. I have a rather artistic, musical family, but it's fair to say that we live a far enough distance from the 1%er-Burgs of the east & west coasts — & for that matter, I in particular tend toward the kind of creativity that would naturally revolt against a producer who took away all creative control for himself — that the Internet's venues for musical conversations (& sales) would simply be the easiest & most efficient choice for us to be heard if we "go pro".
These are the venues that Big Media made clear that it wants to privatize, erecting huge paywalls complete with the cyber-equivalent of concertina wire & attack dogs, not to mention goon squads to stamp out or seize any "indy" acts they can find.
So much for the politics, but what does this have to do with actual musical ideas?
(The Kos Wingding shall show you the way...)
Several Kossacks, while all this was going on back in the winter, made the point that part of the reason Big Media feels threatened by independent artists is that indies, who make the music they want to make, made better music in the process than the cliché corporate pop acts — in a word, that the Big Recording "makes art suck". One might even say that repetitive "earworm" lyrics, choreographed dance moves, & mechanized 4-beats of typical "top-40" pop-tunes perfectly represent the very physical form of the mechanical process that produces them.
With all this as an emotional & "memetic" background, my metaphoric mind got the notion of studying & eventually composing music that's as non-pop as possible. I'll grant others have had such ideas before — including me — but somehow, as a personal creative revolt against the 1-size-fits-all Legacy Media world, I got extra-energetic about researching certain memes, perchance to employ them in my own works:
1. unmetered music,
2. irregularly-metered music,
3. un-rhymed singing,
4. prose as song,
5. spoken prose-rhythm as the basis for musical rhythm.
Fortunately, in terms of music history, these ideas turn out to have a fair amount of precedent. Plenty of musical cultures have unmetered songs, & plenty of others (some Slavic folk rhythms come to mind) alter music-meters to fit poetic lines — which can lead to some fancy time-signatures! Also, the many Jewish & Christian chant notations provide good examples of how prose-lines can be organized into music without the need for a time-signature at all.
As for alternatives to rhyme, our own linguistic ancestors, the Angles & Saxons, based their own songs & poems on alliteration rather than rhyme. Also, their cousins in Scandinavia, in addition to alliteration, used internal assonance (rather than end-rhyme) in some of their more sophisticated works. Meanwhile, plenty of songs even on the pop end of things, while adhering to conventional 4/4 time in their instrumental rhythm, drop rhyme from the song end; examples of this include many J-pop theme songs for anime shows, as well as certain "hipsterish" American tunes that hit the radio in the late 1980s & early 1990s (& no, I haven't forgotten about the many experimental rock examples of unrhymed songs from the 1970s either).
"Spoken word" works & free-verse poetry frequently create challenges for accompanists, as those are a classic example of making the music & rhythm truly follow the words (in this way, arguably the "opposite" of rap — though some experimental hip-hop uses rather unpredictable rhythms). However, my own ideas of this sort tend to involve using some of the rhythmic freedom of free verse, but in a more harmonically organized manner.
Another related project has been related to my bass guitar studies, as off-&-on I have been trying to teach myself how to mimic speech-like sounds on the bass. ("Chatbot" conversations on YouTube have been useful for getting started with this.)
Anyway, those are a few of the ideas that have been running through my head, & my story about how threats of censorship can inspire a person to be even more radically original.
So, how about you? What sort of musical ideas inspire you? Do you have any favorite songs without rhyme, or music with unusual rhythm? Please share your thoughts in the comments!