I don’t want to completely cross currents with what I’m writing about in the annotation for my song, but I wanted to bring up an aspect of working with GarageBand that I’m not discussing at length there: GarageBand’s drummer tracks are super creepy and I’m kind of afraid of them.  A drum machine, I can deal with, it’s a machine, I program it to play what I want it to play.  These “drummers” though, they know what I want them to play already somehow.  And yes, it is unsettling that the vast majority of them are clearly meant to be white guys, and that the only “women” and “people of color” (scare quotes here intended to be indicative of how weird it is that I’m even for a second thinking of these tracks as people, but technology is really, really weird like that) are in the alternative, hip-hop, and R&B genres.  There’s this almost subconscious association being made between ethnicity, gender and musical styles that is really off-putting. What would Arthur Lee or Eminem have to say about this, or for that matter Meg White or Mo Tucker, to name some drummers?  Still, none of this stopped me from using “Mason” and his “loose, swaggering, fill-heavy beats on a vintage-sounding kit all over my song project, and you know what, he does a damn good impression of Levon Helm if you make him follow a funk beat and nudge up the “Swing” slider.

Maybe that’s the ultimate commentary on the themes of this course. Maybe no matter how much technology’s intrusion into our music and our lives weirds us out, we’ll just keep going along with it whenever it’s convenient.  That’s not to say that the course or the conversation are irrelevant; in fact, I think this makes them more relevant than ever.  Music is one of the basic foundations of our or any other culture, and now it, along with everything else is becoming wrapped up in and inextricably linked with technology.  Whether we’re comfortable with it is irrelevant, it’s happening either way, but it behooves us as educated, informed individuals to keep abreast of the pace and nature of those changes.  If we don’t understand these trends, we will not be able to participate in a culture which changes rapidly and leaves behind all it cannot use.  So, at the end of the semester, I’m really glad i stumbled unknowingly into this course, and not because I already know a ton about American music and therefore some aspects of it came easily to me, even though that’s true. Quite the opposite; this course taught me a lot I didn’t already know about a subject I thought I had delved the depths of, and has helped me understand difficult concepts in new ways. I now have access to an entirely different way of thinking about music, and for that I’m grateful.