Many of you already know that I spend a couple hours of my day studying charts on this website. I definitely do enjoy the work. It is time-consuming, but what it lacks in absence of time, it makes up for in value. You won't believe how much you can learn about a person just by looking at their charts. Also, you won't believe how much you can learn about a society by doing this. Mostly, it's enjoyable seeing how much more cultured I am than everyone else. However, every now and then, something pops out at me that's so shocking, so revealing, so corrupt, that I get so emotionally overwhelmed I just can't look at any more charts. It happened today.
Today, I noticed something I had never noticed before.
Everyone is tagging their songs wrong. How can this be? How can no one get it right? Well, it's quite simple. Often, in social constructs, certain standards are built which are effective, but inappropriate, and wrong. The song tagging system, created by ID3 (an artist-run corporation), is one of them. Hypothetically, if I were to ever listen to "Plastic Trees" by
Radiohead, this is what the standard tagging would look like.
Radiohead - Plastic Trees
Did you notice that?
The artist's name is first, and the song's name follows. This implies that the artist is more important than the song, that the song is just a subcategory of the artist. As a real artist, who knows what art really is, that's complete bullshit. Back 100 years ago, the song was the thing on display, not the artist. Who wrote or performed the song didn't matter. The way they thought, they didn't want to hear "Berlin", they wanted to hear Alexander's Ragtime Band. Everything revolved around the song. That's all there was. There were no rock stars back then, there were just great songs. Do you see why this matters so much now?
To elaborate further with cultural examples, there's no song called "Without an Artist", but there is a "Without a Song", and certainly there's no artist named "Without a Song".
The song is clearly more meaningful to us than the artist. So why is our tagging system "Artist - Song"? Who possibly could have started it? Who possibly could have felt that they needed more and more and more "props" for their "hard work"?
The artists themselves! The artists started this formatting system, because they're insecure and are afraid of becoming one hit wonders. This allows bands like
Good Charlotte to make a really really good song to introduce themselves, and then to not try after that. It's completely unfair to songwriters like myself who write songs 100x better than these bands like
The Postal Service.
I have a solution. Let's change the formatting back to SONG (artist) or song emphasized, instead of ARTIST (song) or artist emphasized and song ignored. The formatting will look like this:
Plastic Trees - Radiohead
To encourage a better future for music, better than the present, we must become more song-oriented. There was a reason why the Gershwins, Berlins and Porters were around the same time period. It was
because of the EMPHASIS on SONGS. They were SONGwriters, not ARTISTwriters. Even though the industry is not like this right now, we would be directly influencing music, and we will be directly influencing the future of the history of music. One day, we will look back, and think, "
How could we not have realized this sooner? How could we have been so blind to our blindness?" It's a great feeling, though, to be apart of it... to have front row seats in the "cutting edge" that will shave off the ugly stubble of the world. Isn't that a great feeling?