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I don't dislike technology, honest. But if a chimpanzee gets behind the wheel of a car, the ensuing collision is not the fault of the chimpanzee. Technology changes things, for better and for worse. It gives us not only slick solutions to old problems, but entirely new and unexpected problems. It has changed music profoundly -- not just the product (that's the stuff on the radio) but the process.

So gather 'round, kids, and Gramps will tell you a story about what it used to be like back in the good old days. Back when men wore six-shooters and women wore crinoline, and nobody bathed except on Saturday night ... no, wait, that's a different story. This is the one about the days before MIDI. Before sampling. Before plug-ins and the tapeless studio.

Twenty years ago, when you listened to a cassette tape by an unknown band, you could tell before the end of the intro to the first song whether the band was any good. The drumming would give it away. If the drummer kept lousy time, the band was absolutely not worth listening to.

Here's why the drumming told the tale: In those days, the only practical way to make music, unless your instrument lent itself to solo performance, was to play with other people. If you had no talent, a good drummer wouldn't waste time playing with you. (Credit goes to Bob Doerschuk, who first pointed this out to me. In retrospect, I think Bob missed a factor: If you were rich, you could pay a good drummer to play with you. Good drumming was not a conclusive indication of musical virtue, but bad drumming was certainly a red flag.)

Playing with other people, besides being a decent index of your level of talent or development, was also a great way to further that development. It still is. Playing with others in the privacy of your living room, garage, or basement is not just fun, it's a great learning experience. And once you have a group, you'll learn even more by playing in front of a few audiences. I have the impression that it's harder to manage than it used to be, for various sociological reasons, but it's still possible.

Audiences are not notoriously tolerant of bad music. If you haven't practiced until you're close to note-perfect, if you can't tune your instrument, if you drone on for an hour at a time without conveying any sense of beauty or excitement (always assuming the name of your band isn't the Grateful Dead -- they got away with it for years), you tend not to get invited back.

Back in the day, that was the only way to make music. By the time you approached the front door of a record company, demo tape tremblingly in hand, you were likely to have your act, relatively speaking, together. If you didn't, the decision-makers at the record company could tell. It was a true "don't call us, we'll call you" situation.

Today, especially in the genres dominated by electronic instruments, both the benchmarks and the proving-ground have been largely swept away. The results are not pretty. (Not even when they are pretty. Perhaps especially not then.) Today, provided you're willing or able to part with a stack of cash, your demo can have drums that are perfectly in time -- and crisply recorded, even if you think mic placement is what happens to a guy named Mike at an employment agency.

Thanks to sampling and commercially available sounds, your CD can sound as if it was recorded in Hollywood -- because it was recorded in Hollywood -- even if you did the whole thing on a laptop on the kitchen table. Thanks to MIDI sequence editing, you can produce a note-perfect performance by poking a keyboard with a dowel attached to your nose. You can sound at least vaguely like a 100-piece symphony even if every player you approach about your project backs away hurriedly clutching a crucifix and a clove of garlic.

I'm not trying to denigrate the tools of electronic music. They're wonderful tools to use if your ideas outrun your fingers, if your charts are too esoteric for other musicians to appreciate or too tough for them to cut, if your visionary sonorities are impossible to perform on conventional instruments, if there are no clubs in your area willing to present anything further out than Britney Spears lip-sync contests, if you live in a small cabin in rural North Dakota where there are no other musicians within 50 miles, if you suffer a physical disability that makes it difficult or impossible for you to play a conventional instrument -- or if you simply want to pursue your own vision of perfection without compromises or distractions. There are lots of valid reasons for using a beefed-up computer or a stack of synths and samplers and doing it all yourself.

Having made a decision to use those tools, however, you can do it with vision, courage, and sensitivity, or you can do it the other way.

The trouble is, if you're not playing with others, you may not know the difference. You can't count on the folks who are trying to sell you electronic tools, that's for sure. They're not going to suggest that you take the high road. On the contrary: The idea that there might be two roads diverging in this particular wood may even be threatening to the purveyors of fine gear, because it would imply that some of their customers are making music in ways that lack legitimacy, relevance, or meaning. No, they're going to try to convince you that all you have to do in order to be a prime creative force is buy the right hardware or software.

Partly as a result of grandiose marketing, partly as a result of blind optimism on the part of musicians themselves, and partly because the tools are so incredibly powerful that they really can create fairly convincing illusions, the floodgates have been opened to what we may charitably call a tide of mediocrity. The tools make it relatively simple for a person with only a few slim shreds of talent, a person devoid (whether through native incapacity, lack of education, or soul-deadening immersion in mass media) of any deep understanding of what constitutes musical expression or artistic effort, to sound superficially plausible. With a little diligence, such a person can produce a CD that for six or eight bars at a time is nearly indistinguishable from a CD produced by a seasoned composer, arranger, or instrumentalist.

At the same time (ominous tremolando in the basses and celli), the upper echelons of the recording industry are largely dominated by lawyers and accountants. Not the two groups most noted for the depth of their aesthetic ruminations. The lawyers view musicians as fodder for their favorite power plays, and the accountants view them as a machine that exists solely to disgorge quantities of cash. The lawyers tend to demand musical changes more or less arbitrarily, in order to prove to you (and to themselves) who's boss. The accountants aren't quite that bad. They mean well, but their musical value system -- well, it isn't a musical value system, is it? Accountants measure everything by one yardstick: "Is this going to make a profit? Is it going to make a big enough profit? How will this music affect the quarterly bottom line?"

If they've been around the music business for long enough to catch the fever (more than five or ten minutes, in other words), these guys may actually pride themselves on their taste and judgment. But anything resembling real artistic expression is almost certain to make them uncomfortable, or even frighten them. Real art would demand that they (and their customers) think and feel and interact with the world as whole human beings -- something that they may indeed no longer be capable of. Real art would take more time for concentrated attention than they have available between phone calls. Real art can seldom be processed in standardized, regimented ways by the economic machinery of record bins and radio playlists. And real artists tend to be stubborn, wayward visionaries, not team players.

(In the decade since I wrote the preceding paragraphs there has, to be sure, been a lot of activity in the indie record movement. With the advent of cheap CD burners, you too can become a recording artist without ever darkening the door of a real record company. Slagging the excesses and deficiencies of the major labels has come to seem almost too easy. On the other hand, hip-hop has become big corporate business, and a lot of hip-hop is made by people who, at least if we're to believe their P.R., explicitly don't consider themselves musicians. So it's tough to make a case that the big picture is any rosier than it was in 1992. The next paragraph is looking a little ratty too, again because of changes in the music business; I've updated it a little, but I'm not going to tie myself in knots. The demographic picture has changed, but the underlying dynamic hasn't.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Baby Boom generation has hit 50. When their parents were 50, guess what they were listening to: Lawrence Welk. (A few years back, curiously enough, the old Welk shows surfaced on PBS as classic programming. This says a great deal, none of it flattering, about PBS.) The Boomers are no longer even faintly interested in rock and roll, except for its nostalgia value. In their gauzy and decrepit fantasies, the Rolling Stones are about on a par with Fabian. But they still have plenty of disposable income, and the quivering antennae of the accountants at the record companies are exquisitely attuned to this fact.

Oh, and one more thing: Musicians today, like practically everybody else, have been for the past 30 or 40 years absorbing a steady diet of television. Television is an almost wholly pernicious, destructive influence on everybody and everything it touches. (If you're in a bookish mood, I can recommend Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Don't know if it's still in print.) TV inculcates certain cultural values. To wit:

1. Always look good, no matter what.
2. A snappy comeback or an emotion-laden slogan is always preferable to a reasoned analysis.
3. If it takes more than 15 seconds to explain or understand something, slap a label on it that lets you either love it or hate it, and move on.
4. If you feel bad, buy something shiny, eat something greasy, or take a pill.

To sum up, then, what we have are a bunch of inexperienced, poorly trained musicians who, under the influence of television, think that the way to play great music is to buy a shiny new synthesizer and use it to record stuff that has a sparkly surface gloss and can be comprehended in less than 15 seconds. Their most zealous efforts are aimed at impressing accountants and lawyers, who have zero interest in art except insofar as it provides them with the raw material to make money and/or play power games (often, though not exclusively, with musicians as cannon fodder). And the way the lawyers and accountants stand to make the most money is by selling music to two demographic segments: The youngsters will buy whatever tub-thumping idiocy gives their hormones the biggest rush, and the geezers are unconsciously yearning for the soothing strains of Lawrence Welk.

Are you beginning to sense the dimensions of the problem?

No wonder so much of the music made with synths and samples is roadkill. (To say nothing of turntables, which were still flying under the radar when I wrote this piece in '92. See "Use a Turntable, Go to Jail," below.) What's miraculous is that in the midst of this whirlpool that sucks music down, down, down, little bits of wonderful stuff sometimes bob to the surface. It's enough to make you optimistic, really.

Want your music to bob to the surface? (Be warned: There may not be much money in it.) Here are some irreverent and possibly healthy suggestions:

Listen to some music that you don't understand. Don't just listen to it casually -- sit down and listen attentively from start to finish. Resist the impulse to raid the refrigerator. When the piece is finished, listen to it again, and try to figure out what the musicians had in mind. Assume that they were intelligent, proficient at their instruments, and well-rehearsed;.that they had reasons for doing whatever they did. Resist the temptation to wallow in contempt, in other words. Formulate a theory about the reasons that motivated them. Listen to the piece again and attempt to validate or disprove your theory.

Instead of hanging out alone in your home studio, play with some other musicians. Ask them what they think is important in music. (Not all musicians are articulate, unfortunately. "The feel" is not a very useful response to this type of question.) Tell them what you think is important. Be passionate. Get in an argument. Whether or not you're able to resolve the argument -- perhaps especially if you're not able to -- make a commitment to one another to play together for a period of time. Keep the commitment.

Get some rigorous musical training in an area where you feel less than competent. Take a college-level course. Read a serious, difficult book on music. Practice your instrument three hours a day -- for a year or two if your schedule permits. Use a metronome.

Unplug your television and put it out in the garage. You will immediately think of several strong reasons why you can't possibly do this, even if you understand why you should. Such resistance is normal. The point of this exercise is to lower the mental noise level, which will create a vacuum in which creative ideas will arise. Trust me: I've lived quite comfortably for years at a time without a TV.

Put off buying that new instrument, software, or sample library you just have to have. Instead, spend the time finding new ways to make music with the equipment you already own. If you find you're getting bored with the sounds you're making, that's the time to persevere. Boredom is a sign that your creative intelligence is about to wake up.

Experiment at length with musical materials that you can't figure out how to fit into your current style. Write pieces using these materials, and play the pieces for your friends. It's especially important to play the pieces with pride and assurance if you don't feel they're entirely successful. Being apologetic is a way of brainwashing yourself into slipping back into an old, familiar rut.

Imagine a single, ideal listener for your music, and play exclusively for the person you've imagined. My own preference would be to imagine a listener who is patient, attentive, intelligent, and musically literate, but your needs might differ. Feel free to imagine a listener who is, oh, sexually attractive, or rich.

If you should be lucky enough to attract the attention of a record company or concert promoter, naturally you'll be tempted to compromise -- to play for a definable demographic, and preferably a large one, rather than for that single ideal listener. The pressures you'll be under will be insidious, and incessant. Your manager may try to manipulate you; your bandmates may mutiny. I can't honestly tell you what to do: My own value system is sometimes scratched and dented, or at any rate rendered inconvenient, by my job, so I'm not in a position to recommend (as I did in the published version of this essay) that anybody else take the moral high road and insist on playing only the music that they personally find most meaningful.

I'm fairly sure there's some value in sticking to your guns, even when you're fearful of economic consequences. Britney Spears is making a lot of money this year, but Frank Zappa will be remembered long after Britney is forgotten. If you feel you need to be an arrogant asshole artist who refuses to compromise -- or, to look at it in a slightly healthier way, if you just want to do what brings you the most pleasure -- you may win big or lose big. But at least you'll be playing for real stakes. As one of my favorite schlock authors, Erle Stanley Gardner, once noted, shills can't cash chips.

That's enough suggestions for now. Grab a few of them, add passion, and stir. Results are guaranteed.

What results? I haven't the faintest idea.

If you can predict the results, it isn't art.

Footnote: Use a Turntable, Go to Jail

How could an essay on bad synthesizer music be complete without an update that puts turntables under the microscope?

First off, let me admit that I'm a certified Old Guy. As such, I have very little sympathy for the idea that someone tormenting a pair of turntables is a musician. Seems like paint-by-numbers to me. On the other hand, I was once a certified Young Guy, so I understand that alienating the Old Guys is part of the point.

I challenge myself by asking, "Well, Jim, are conga drums a musical instrument?" If someone thwacking away on a pair of congas can be called a musician (let's set aside the drummer jokes for now), someone thwacking away on a pair of turntables surely deserves the same title.

And let's face it, mechanical/analog technology is not a bad way to play sampled sounds live. There's a kind of immediacy about playing turntables that's just about impossible to get with digital gear, unless you've got a budget like CNMAT or the MIT Media Lab. Turntables require practice, but they don't require a degree in computer science, and that's surely a good thing.

If I tried to play turntables, I'd undoubtedly break them. So I'm not the best person to comment on what makes a turntablist a genuine creative artist. I could mumble about whether the player's work is capable of any significant emotional range or is just a display of meaningless virtuosity -- but Paganini showed off a lot of meaningless virtuosity on the violin, and by any definition I know of, Paganini was an artist.

The only yardstick I feel comfortable applying is this: If you have trouble playing with others, you're probably not a musician. Unlike writing or painting, music is largely a collaborative art. Multitrack tape and the digital studio have made it possible for solo musicians to do what painters do -- but I have yet to hear a solo turntable album, and I'm not sure I'd want to hear one, any more than I'd want to hear a solo conga drum CD. If you can sit down with a drummer, a bass player, and a guitarist and fit your turntables into whatever songs they happen to call, then you're playing music. If you can't, you're just blowing smoke.