by Robert Phoenix
One of the great transitions that we as a culture are in the midst of is the shift from consumer culture to creative culture. This shift is being powered and driven by large due to affordable technologies that have been developed so that people can have access to tools that at one time would have cost somewhere in the thousands of dollars to access and learn. No greater example can be found than in the realm of music.

Part of the music industry’s decline can be traced to the development of affordable home studios that can be accessed via a desktop or laptop. This small development has had far reaching consequences. Record companies, which would advance money to make records in state of the art recording studios began to have less prominence as gatekeepers granting permission to creative agents, often at a great price to make music. While the record labels also acted as important creative filters, the act of making music independently freed from the constraints of the marketplace, is more rule now than the exception.

From Commentator to Creator

I recently experienced this transformational quality myself and it has had a profound impact on my life. I’ve been a commentator and critic of music and the music industry for twenty years, but just recently, I began to make my own music with the help of software that allows me to sample, build, loop and mix a variety of sounds, The results have been both empowering and liberating. My first attempt to make something was an exercise in releasing my angst and tension. It resulted in eight minutes worth of dark and industrial ambience with jagged glitches and heavy beats. From a process perspective, it allowed me to touch my shadow in a direct way and exorcise it through the medium of sound. Encouraged by my first effort I have since gone onto to create four new tracks, the latest being a thirty minute meditation called, “Delta Cascade” where I employed binaural beats and a wash of various white noise sources, colored by sacred sounds and intonations.

It dawned on me that the process that I had engaged in was stirring new possibilities inside of me. If I could do this for myself, make my own music, what else was available? Concurrently my thoughts have turned to gardening and other home based activities that involve direct participation with a creative process while altering my relationship with consumer goods at large. I’ve also been thinking about how it would impact us as a culture if we were to experience a similar collective epiphany? I began to think about groups of people working together to build their own electric cars, create their own solar powered utilities networks, band together to foster and care for neglected land as food growing greenbelts and turning obsolete and abandoned structures into new spaces of living for the homeless with attendant programs to reach out and bring the lost and forgotten back into a place of meaningful living.

Bypassing the Gatekeeper, Spiritual Self-Sufficiency

What has occurred to me throughout this is the ability to bypass the gatekeeper or in less secular terminology, the rabbi, guru or priest. That when we have gained enough knowledge to create our own art or build our own communities the middleman will no longer play the same role. While we were solely dependent at one point or another in their ability to define and order a chaotic existence, we are reaching a spiritual and material maturity, which demands that we become accountable for our own creations and in my recent discovery, the most literal sense.

Not everyone is wired to make their own music, but each of us has within us the power to shift from the role of the consumer to the creator in our own unique fashion. Beyond the “audacity of hope” lies within us all, the power to embrace and harness our creative potential to transform not only our own lives, but the lives of others in concert around us.

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