Non-Fiction Music

I want to say "in the preceding article" but from the reader's perspective it's the "following" article. Let's try this:

In the chronologically preceding but physically following article, I endorse the jam band "Drones of Saturn." They are an example of artists who make "Non-Fiction Music." I, AEJOTZ, am another example. Feel free to genuflect.

I've probably written about NFM before but I never do anything quite the same way twice so I'm not really repeating myself if I do it again. Kind of.

There's a sliding scale of gray between extremes of "Fictional Music" and NFM but it's easier to describe the concept if I swing far to either side.

Far over on the FM side you have professional hit song writers who construct musical product according to a strict formula. This product is then sung by an age/gender/fashion appropriate "star" who performs the song the way an actor performs a script. Every step of the process is phony.

Way over on the NFM side you have a penniless bohemian sitting in an urban park coaxing some old instrument to play a spontaneous tune to the morning, expressing the feelings of an artistic soul grooving in the ever-changing now. The whole process is alive and real.

In-between would be songs artists felt when they wrote them, but that later became just "oldies" they are expected to play. (Does Alice Cooper still perform "Eighteen?")

A jam session is, ideally, an expression of spontaneous extemporaneous creativity. I qualify the preceding statement with "ideally" because I've been to "jam sessions" in which one or more egos were doing more showboating than extemporaneous jamming. Trying to impress the other players with your Yngwie scales is not the same as sharing and exploring a groove with the other players.

Ah, the key I was looking for just popped up: "exploring." A good jam doesn't just meander over existing worn rutted trails; it blazes a new trail. Not all "musicians" can do this. A guy who can learn his parts and play in a cover band is called a "musician," even if he never creates an original piece of music. He is totally FM. Only an adventurous sonic explorer can be NFM. Dig?

My new pals (I haven't met them yet) Drones of Saturn are trailblazers. You can draw comparisons between their sound and that of some bands that have gone before, but that's just nerdalizing. Oh crap. Now I have to explain nerdalizing. Sometimes I wish I'd quit making up terms.

I once wrote a seafaring song in 3/4 time that I performed for a number of years. After one such performance, some jackass smugly declared that I'd imitated "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot. The Lightfoot tune was released in 1976. I wrote mine in 1971. I was nerdalized.

Nerdalizing is when some uncreative, unimaginative nerd jackass compares anything and everything new to the few things he's experienced in his stupid past. The nerdalist will ALWAYS say, "oh, that sounds like _____." Nerdalizing can be found in every comments section on every music-related webpage in the universe.

Anyway, back to the Drones. They play electric guitar, drums and bass guitar, so they sound a lot like a band that plays electric guitar, drums and bass guitar. DUH!!! The important thing is that they start with a hint of a shadow of a germ of a groove and then explore the @#$% out of it until they've completely ravished it and left it panting and satisfied in a ditch by the road. Pure creativity. Pure Non-Fiction Music.

Have I sharpened this point enough, yet? I sure hope so.