Criticism

I just deleted my Facebook account. My main beef with Facebook is that it’s a wide channel for distributing lies, untruths and misinformation. According to Pew Research, 45% of Americans get some of their news from Facebook, and 20% do so “often.” It alarms me that Facebook has just announced a new news service. I don’t trust them. News should come from a source that I can trust to be accurate, and Facebook news can’t be trusted.

I also realized, on my last couple spins through my Facebook feed, that most of what I see there isn’t worth my time. Pictures of people eating in restaurants, and their food, vacation photos, cute political sayings. Not worth my time.

Facebook has a huge amount of political and economic power, which it has no right to. As many commentators have pointed out, there has been a large shift in power from governments to corporations over the last hundred years. The reach of the big technology companies – Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook – has put them at the top of the heap in terms of corporate power. I support this by using the services provided by these companies. Facebook is the worst, and it provides services I don’t really need, so I’m glad to make this statement against Facebook by ceasing to participate.

I hear music, not words, so I don’t much like music that comes in the form of “songs.” The whole of Ken Burns’ PBS series on country music (in the U.S,) celebrates singer/songwriters. They are the protagonists, the ones credited with creating country music. They are the front men and women, out front, singing songs that tell stories about their lives. But I don’t hear the stories; I just hear the notes.

I am very tuned into notes. I have perfect pitch, which means I know the pitch of notes I hear. I’ve played in symphonies and rock bands. I’ve scored five movies and a dozen modern-dance pieces, besides composing many stand-alone pieces. But I don’t hear words. I can listen to a rock song and know all the parts: which notes each musician is playing. But the words go right by me. I can listen to a song a hundred times and have no idea what the words mean.

Popular music, in which category I would place pop, rock, folk, and country music, consists almost entirely of short-form (3 to 5 minutes in length) songs with words. Jazz has songs, too, but a lot of it is purely instrumental and some of it is more long-form. Western classical music is predominantly instrumental, though there is a long vocal tradition going back to Gregorian chant.

In the Country Music documentary, 70% of the attention is paid to singer-songwriters, 10% to songwriters who aren’t singers, 10% to producers, and 10% to session musicians. Producers and session players were often responsible for arranging the songs, i.e. deciding what instruments will play what notes, and in what style. The accompaniment parts are hugely important elements of country songs, both recorded and performed live. The documentary significantly undervalues their contributions.

I don’t really like country music, except for the early folk-like and hillbilly string-band stuff. For me, the words are too important a component for me to enjoy it, and the music itself is too simplistic.

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I read a lot of books, listen to a lot of music, and watch a lot of movies. I thought I might enjoy commenting on them. As the saying goes, “learn by writing, as much as by reading.”