Stylistic morphing, Craft Me Art

All packaged up in a perfect combination of trans-genre morphing between rock, hip hop and something reminiscent of techno/ scratching, to appeal to the widest possible mass consumer group between the ages of approximately 12-25 years old, Linkin Park time and time again manage to produce a sound so engineered its hard to imagine any authentic instrumentals ever went into the tracks. Now I’m not even being close to critical at this point, for I have to admit that the marketing scheme behind the release of perfectly to a mass audience is pure genius. Having read the readings by Sandywell and Beer, the concept arose in my mind that what is problematic is defining genre and identifying it’s fixed points rather than to view music as a progressive movement that naturally does pander towards hybridization. Indeed one of Linkin Park’s albums was called exactly that, The Hybrid Theory. Perhaps to resist the merging of organic sound and technologically induced mixing is some form of old-school loyalty towards the days of live performance and garage bands I hold so dear to my heart. Of course resistance is futile, for the horizontal promotion of one text to many media formats (Music video, use in film and television, censorship, remixing, parody and armature sampling online) would eventually warrant a change in the actual text itself. Trans-morphing is to music as collages are to fine art; its validation is in its mere presence though for music it’s through the fusion of a team of expert audio engineers and marketing moguls that craft the art.