Read Ricardo Villalobos’ Music Manifesto

As a general matter, it’s difficult for me to write my personal opinions about music, especially about entire genres of music I might not like in a given moment. And classifications or definitions about musical “types” is the opposite of what I see in music and understand it to be. Music is music and just music. Music should have no Babylonian boundaries or distinctions and should not be ruled by economic interests. I’m interested in what people have in common through music. Similarities over differences. Music shows its similarities by itself and music alone allows the people to recognize those similarities.

After the Industrial Revolution, the new bosses needed to promote and tell a new fairy tale—a fairy tale about a relationship humans have with products. Ultimately, the point of this fairy tale is to sell more products to more atomized individuals (the opposite of music). It’s a promotion of the completely artificial and unique phenomena called “INDEPENDENCY”—an economic model to produce and sell more specific and personal products to make people feel unique and products seem distinct from each other.

But nothing in the entire universe is independent. That’s just a businessman’s fantasy. They want to help compensate for the disadvantages of reality with a legalized LIE, keeping the customer uninformed about the real price of production costs and making more money than anybody really needs. They aggressively promote the differences and various classifications amongst people who are actually quite the same. It’s their way of being happy and protecting their interests in tough economic times. They want you to belong to something. They see it as necessary to be part of whatever kind of group they’ve created and to share what YOU have instead of selling large amounts of individual products to individual, independent people. It’s a hidden and accepted thing you see once you find yourself alone. To be alone is the most expensive price to pay to finally be noticed in the crowd. To feel FREE AND INDEPENDENT is heaven on earth? What a lie.

Instead of writing my personal opinions about what makes one kind of music different from another kind of music, I find it’s always more useful to say something about what people have in common—music, for example.

This text first appeared first in the Winter 2013/2014 issue of Electronic Beats Magazine. Click here to read more from the magazine.

Published February 18, 2014. Words by A.J. Samuels.