Several months ago, I came across a faith-based song contest whose aim was to transform culture through the creation of great art.  I thought the “whys” they gave were solid, but it was their “how” that concerned me.  They encouraged the use of familiar song forms and chord progressions because, as they put it, “most people don’t like to think very hard when they listen to music” and “whenever something new is introduced into our minds, it causes at least some bit of cognitive dissonance.”  As someone who wants to hear music that’s inventive and intellectually challenging, I was bothered by these statements.  While sharing their desire to create more substantial and less disposable music, this particular group also seemed to promote a formulaic approach to songwriting.  In my opinion, it reinforces the industry trend of favoring mass appeal over creative innovation.  If you knock off all the rough edges and make sure it can be easily digested by everyone, the art becomes bland and generic.  As they say, if you try to please everyone, you’ll please no one.

This situation reminds me of a series of projects by graphic artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid.  Komar and Melamid were born in the Soviet Union, where the government was touted as being “for the people” even though the general public was never consulted in matters that concerned them.  After immigrating to the United States and experiencing its consumer-driven culture, they were inspired to create art using a more democratic and scientific process.  In the mid-1990s, they created a series of paintings under the title The People’s Choice.  Using opinion polls to determine what visual elements people liked and didn’t like in art, they created a series of data-driven paintings that showed the most and least wanted paintings for over a dozen countries.  (You can check them out here.)  The duo collaborated with composer Dave Soldier and lyricist Nina Mankin to adapt their methodology to music, polling about 500 people to determine the lyrics, themes, instruments, and musical structure people wanted and did not want to hear in a song.  The data was analyzed, and the end result was “The Most Wanted Song” and “The Most Unwanted Song”.

“The Most Wanted Song” is a five-minute long love duet that uses piano, saxophone, drums, bass, and electric guitar.  It’s smooth and easy to listen to, but at the same time, it feels very calculated and familiar.  It’s what you’d expect to hear as the credits roll after a 1990s direct-to-video movie.  “The Most Unwanted Music”, however, is a 22-minute long monstrosity.  To give you a snapshot, there’s an opera singer rapping about her life as a cowboy; a children’s choir singing holiday jingles that all end with “Do all your shopping at Walmart”; jarring improvisations consisting of banjos, tubas, accordions, bagpipes, and pipe organs; the shouting of political phrases through a bullhorn; and an ensemble folk song about locking arms and singing to make “bells of freedom ring-ding-ding”.  The strange thing is that many listeners – myself included – actually enjoyed listening to the “unwanted” music more than the “wanted” music.  The “unwanted” music is so out there and ridiculous that I can’t help but laugh when I listen to it.  It has a sense of humor and a personality, and you can tell that the musicians were having fun “trolling” their listeners.  By deliberately trying to do what people didn’t want, the musicians actually created something that many people liked more.

One of the questions that Komar and Melamid sought to explore with these artistic experiments is “What kind of culture is produced by a society that lives and governs itself by opinion polls?”  As with most things, moderation is the key – market research and established structures can serve as a good starting point, but they won’t always be representative of what people truly want or what’s good for them.  As an artist of faith, maybe the solution is to rely less on surveys and formulas and more on divine guidance.  Who better to ask than the One who created our hearts and knows what we need?