Backbeat

Why are so many "serious" musicians so mystified as to how to garner mass appeal? It's the backbeat, silly.

You can play whatever you damn well please over a strong backbeat. The masses want to hear the thunderous footsteps of mythical beasts on beats 1 and 3 along with massive quantities of ear-splitting high-frequency brittleness on beats 2 and 4. If you give them those two things together, they will go ape shit for your musical presentation, no matter what melodic or harmonic atrocities you commit over the top of Western man's most primal rhythm.

Seriously, when was the last time you saw a song on myspace with 48,629 listens?? And when was the last time that so many of the harmonic and melodic ideas were so unabashedly "outside"?

Personally, I can only appreciate the backbeat thing when there's this kind of playing going on along with it, but I'll bet that many many people who think a tri-tone sub is a sandwich could be engaged by this kind of music also, if not for entirely different reasons.

It's not that us modernists have no heart, soul, or rhythm. We just need a little side of pitch to go with a heaping plate of rhythm.