SonicScoop - Creative, Technical & Business Connections For NYC’s Music & Sound Community: Music isn’t perfect. It never was. And it never will be. By nature, people are flawed. Inadvertently, so is the music we create. But isn’t that what also makes it so amazing?
Indescribable, intangible moments can often be found in our favorite recordings. Call it accidental, call it happenstance, or just plainly call it a mistake. If you listen to music as much as I do I’m sure you’ve come across a few.
5 comments:
While some may see little mistakes as sloppy, I kind of like them. They remind me of the human touch that makes art great. This actually reminds me of an interaction I once had with my grandmother. She was learning to knit sweaters, and was stressed and worried about the little mistakes in the construction. I told her that the mistakes were what let us know that the sweaters were made by hand instead of by machine. Everything is so slickly polished with autotune and other augmenting technologies that sometimes we lose the roughness that reminds us a piece came from the hands of real live humans. Imperfections are the very stuff of life.
I enjoy the imperfections that are left in songs. I feel like it makes the track a lot more personal. A lot of the music that I listen to on a daily basis contains these intentionally incorporated 'mistakes'. I enjoy knowing that not everything is perfect, it is beautiful. Like Olivia said, the 'human touch' makes art great. Not only in music, but in other art forms as well. I don't intentionally look for imperfections, but when they are there, I don't think of them as bad, I embrace them and accept them and appreciate them. Everything these days seems so polished and refined, it's nice to hear that people make room for a little roughness.
I think that leaving in some mistakes are a great way to make art personal. When I was at summer camp in Washington state, there were camp elders who made it their duty to preserve Native American culture in the area and a lot of the native teachers and artist they brought in to teach us, talked about the importance of leaving at least a single mistake in your art. They thought that it gave whatever you were making a soul, and I definitely agree. In the example with the Police, I'm sure hearing that record probably means more to them than a perfect one, because it allows them to relive a personal funny moment they had together.
I'd be willing to bet money that in today's streamlined world of music production none of these slips would have made it beyond studio. I miss these tiny imperfections; they are what provide the sense of authenticity and they serve as an ultimate reminder that the person on the other side of your headphones is, in fact, a person and not a digital product. Also, these slips are now immortalized moments from the lives of these bands. These genuine, unfiltered, unadulterated slips allow the listeners to connect with these bands. We've all yelled obscenities when we mess something up. This is the ultimate reminder of what - at its most essential - music is: a moment in time encapsulated as a kind of message in a bottle.
Now that they've been pointed out, it's pretty clear that the mistakes in the songs are actually mistakes. Before, I probably would have just assumed them to be intentional; some of them especially sound like they could have been put in for a reason. Personally, I would much prefer not to see the mistakes in my own work; I would rather everything at least appear intentional. But I agree with the other commenters -- the mistakes make the music that much more interesting, and definitely more human. It's really endearing to hear the little things that are just slightly off because they remind us that the singer or performer was just like one of us. Especially the laugh in 'Roxanne' -- I had never actually noticed it before, but it was nice to hear.
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