About

You can't get the sound from a story in a magazine.

It's a line from a Billy Joel song called It's still rock and roll to me. Much of the song verbally describes fashion and I feel like the song is saying that visuals became too important to the music industry and modern music has lost its way with the rise of music videos and recorded stage shows.

There's objective evidence that's correct. I saw some article saying, essentially, the highest quality modern music is from the sixties and seventies and it's all been downhill since then. (I think tech industry changes or whatever created pressure to grab attention quickly and pushed out quality.)

One line is:

Don't waste your money on a new set of speakers You get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers

That sounds incredibly cynical, like he thinks the industry is telling artists like him: Don't bother to invest in anything pertinent to music quality. Just market yourself to the fool masses and make your peace with it.

Billy Joel's music videos aren't that good. He's not really into it. But he's one of the best musicians of my lifetime and I love his music and I guess he wishes more people were into the music and not the window dressing surrounding the music industry.

My writing is my art. I'm similarly really critical of bad writing.

And in recent months I've stripped away most of the extraneous visuals -- embedded videos, background images -- from my various sites. If you aren't here for the writing, get off my blogs.