There is a proverb saying “A man can say horse in nine languages but when he wants to ride he buys a cow”. This I use very often in the music industry. You bump into too many people that think music is how fast or good you play an instrument. That is just a small part of the education of making a  successful living as a musician. More people listen actually on Crazy Frog then Steve Vai, and you know what, Crazy Frog is actually more music than Steve Vai.

I sometimes have meetings with many different genres when I’m working with political decisions inside the music industry (i’m on some advisory boards for different kind of government funding and stuff). What always annoys me is that some genres think they are better than others. Jazz is a good example (there are more to like classic, art music and a couple of others). They still think that it is a show seeing someone jamming off on some theme. And many times demands to special treated. To be honest, again, some of the worst shows in my life has been jazz shows. Music has to do with so much more than just a 30 minutes solo, like making a good song which seems very hard for the jazz people. Also doing a  show out of the stuff seems hard to them. No, it’s not good seeing some old dude in a suite sprung out from Miami Vice jerking off a guitar. If you think that is a show you never have seen Rammstein.

When people then come into our office and we listen to a crappy song and they in a dream vision tells me that the bass solo is so great I just stop listening. It’s like claiming that that raisin in a pile of poo is edible because the raisin actually tastes good. Even if you took the raisin out it will have poo stains on it and eating the whole pile just to get that raisin is even worse.

I just hate when people suggest that you should work with someone because they are good on the instrument. If they can’t write a good song, there is no point. You can always learn to be better to play the instrument, but writing songs you need talent. So a talented songwriter can be good on an instrument, but a person good on the instrument is very unlikely to be skilled to train to write good songs.

I guess it’s this that also makes these people thinking that they are better than the other since the can do the scale up and down. That is their only defense. I rather take The Ramones before Yngwie Malmsteen at any day.

Here is Rammstein from Madison Square Garden and yes I was the audience on this legendary show.