Reading Blog #2

John Cage was a revolutionary for his generation. His composing that involved more than just musical sounds was an idea that was unheard of during his time. He knew that his music wasn’t the most beautiful or the most structured, and a lot of his pieces weren’t able to be remade as precisely as they were preformed because of the amount of randomness and chance he intertwined into his pieces. However, he created the idea that all sounds are music, rather than just sounds that society deems as musical or beautiful. He got as equally ridiculed as he did praise for this concept. Without John Cage, the music industry would not be where it is today. Techno, EDM, rap, and pop music all take from the concept that everything is music. When reading about how he incorporated sounds of his everyday life into his music, I immediately thought of the modern artist Tyler, The Creator. Tyler creates music anywhere from rap to alternative and everywhere in between. In one of his songs, the outro for it consists of car doors slamming, the car starting, and a radio turning on saying “Power 106…”, but this is just one example of many from not only Tyler, but many modern artists. A lot of rap songs nowadays include voicemails in their songs to help push their story or concept along. The first time that I listened to any of these songs, I never questioned the sounds from everyday life in them, I only thought about them as music and part of the composition. All this growth, creativity, and rule breaking in the music industry is due to John Cage and his tendency of being radical, he opened up the possibility of music being an art form and changed the entire musical industry as we know it.