Music: What's the Point?

While obsessing over the new Malkmus (ex-Pavement front man) album this
week while teaching myself some guitar chords and bass riffs, it's
dawning on me that I really don't know what the fuck music is for. See,
I aspire to be an indie rock band, tour the indie rock scene, play in
indie rock clubs and make out with indie rock girls, but simultaneously
a higher/better/simpler side of me is wondering if there could be more
to music than drinkin' and screwin'. The Malkmus album is great, but it
doesn't hit you over the head with a Message, to say nothing of
Transmission, and I am reminded again and again of Stuart Davis's
brilliant marriage (in recent albums at least) of punk-pop and tunes
with REAL emotional/spiritual depth, heft, rigor, and ruckus. This all
comes out, of course, of both Stu's exhaustion of the "rock stars and
models" lifestyle, and his current and deepening commitment to practice
as both an artist and a meditator. Dig enough in one spot, and
eventually oil's gonna come up is what I say.

So where does this leave the beginning musician, who one day hopes to
shine and radiate with Kosmic energy, squeezed through the indie rock
filter and infiltrated into clubs and galleries across the contiguous
48? Which do I focus on: the music or the message? Duh, the music dummy
(I can barely play bass for more than 20 minutes without wanting to
finger puke). Our going model is: come up with some kick-ass chord
progressions, perfect these to a relative degree, then sit back,
reflect, and absorb, then see what lyrics your intuition tells you to
write on top of them. A long time ago, in the liner notes to Pavement's
3rd album "Wowee Zowee", Malkmus famously wrote about the current state
of the mid-90s music scene: "there is no art in these songs, they
become exactly their limitations."

In other words, those who don't try, who don't reflect and don't ponder
the states their raw music/demo tracks evoke deep in their being,
inevitably pump out more of the same clichéd drivel we find clogging
the campus radio closets across the country. Music today lacks
surprise, emotion, danger, so caught up in posing and sleazy guitar
riffs are these new wave jokers, or "weird for weird's sake" are the
neo-folk progabees (my beloved Fiery Furnaces of course), that
something is still deeply, deeply amiss in post-9/11 independent music,
and I'm here to fucking change that.

Uh, once I learn to play bass.