A recent Toastmasters meeting and subsequent conversation has prompted me to reflect upon how much of what I know is based on fact and how much on opinion, particularly when it comes to people.
I've been listening to a style of music called synthwave for a few months now - it is a genre I encountered at the pre-show for the Muse Simulation Theory tour back in early 2019. Being a fan of electronica and soundtrack-inspired atmospheric soundscapes, it made sense that it would be something I'd be into, and perhaps a bit surprising that it took me so long to stumble across it.
Wanting to learn more about it, I pre-ordered a documentary about it called Rise of the Synths (which, delightfully, is available on VHS in addition to DVD and BluRay...) and Glory watched it with me back in late January. There are a ton of interviews with synthwave musicians of varying fame and influence, and the documentary actually starts in the current day before moving back in time, ending up not just in the 80s but looking (too briefly in my opinion) at the pioneers of synthesizer music like Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream. Cult film director John Carpenter's narration is very well done, and highly appropriate, given how influential his soundtracks have been on the style.
Although a couple of producers in Rise of the Synths have predicted that synthwave could or will become a major influence on the music scene, there is a recognition that the successful artists enjoy a peculiar, low-key type of fame and celebrity, although it has been growing significantly since around 2011 (and the release of the film Drive, surprisingly enough).
Earlier this month, I had been struggling to come up with a speech for my Toastmasters program (still meeting over Microsoft Teams every other Thursday at lunch!) and decided that since hardly anyone was aware of this music, it could make a decent topic. I included references to my experience at the Muse concert, the documentary and a few other tidbits, and called my speech, "What the Heck is a Synthwave?" I was pretty happy with my presentation overall, and it seemed to be well received.
Speeches get a brief verbal evaluation in the same meeting they are presented in, so I was astonished when my evaluator began by saying, "This is weird - I listen to a fair amount of synthwave myself - in fact, it is probably the style of music I listen to the most right now..." and then went on to critique my speech very favourably, but with a couple things I can look at improving next time around.
In a regular meeting there is a paper ballot we can fill out with our favourite speeches as well as feedback for the other speakers, presenters and evaluators. For online meetings, we now use an MS Form to accomplish the same thing, and one of the responses I received said "Wow, I saw Muse in Edmonton at Red's back in the day, and also travelled to Vancouver to see a synthwave band called Carpenter Brut."
Unbelievable - in a meeting of eight people, three of us were fans of what I had thought to be an impossibly niche musical genre! In fact, I had only heard about Carpenter Brut from a colleague who I knew at least as eclectic taste in music as I did.
When I told him about it, he laughed in amazement, the same way I had, and we both marveled at the statistical improbability of it all.
"You know," he said, "you reach a certain age and some of your impressions of the world get a little more fixed. And you work in a corporate environment dealing with financial services, and you figure that the majority of the people around you are maybe mostly a bunch of boring stuffed shirts. But you've just disproven that!"
I believe he is right, and that there is a lesson to be had here -it is easy and human to think of ourselves as the stars of the show, and maybe even as the most interesting castmembers, but who knows what we might learn about the other people onstage if we paid a bit more attention, or, heaven forbid, asked them?
Footnote: The band Gunship released their cover of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" as a lyric video (embedded above), and included this note:
We wanted to do something a little different this year and so here’s our cover of @TheBeatles’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’. What a year… To anyone out there struggling with isolation and loneliness, this one’s for you.
The song ‘Eleanor Rigby’ really is a sad and extremely poignant song, dealing with issues of disillusionment, loneliness, and isolation in society. ‘Look at all the lonely people' - is a lyric that has stuck with us forever. We wondered about a modern day Eleanor Rigby, and what it would be like if a character like her was alive today and experiencing 2020. We felt some of the song’s themes dovetailed closely with the negative revelations surrounding the mass adoption of social media, phone addiction and the proliferation of the ‘pseudo-connections’ these platforms provide. The artwork for our cover version shows a young ‘Eleanor Rigby’, illuminated by her device, dependent on it, manipulated by it, and totally in the clutches of addiction to it. ‘Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door’ - this facade or metaphorical mask that she puts on is now perhaps equivalent to today’s face modifying filters.
The notion of ‘keeping up appearances’ despite problems / unhappiness is problematic. The pandemic and resulting lockdowns have of course also given many of us a strong experience of loneliness in the real world. We have been trying to deal with our personal experience of this by being creative, which has been a much needed port in the storm. We’ve alway found music to be a great comfort and we hope you guys do too. HUGE love to all you guys. We’re working hard to finish up album 3!
Ok, so that's pretty cool, and that's what we were playing name that tune with prior to Walk the Moon taking the stage at the Muse concert, right! Love it!
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