Deadlines. They suck, right? Paper due on Tuesday. Homework must be submitted online by 6 p.m. Wednesday or else. Poor Jack Bauer only has 24 hours to stop a nuclear bomb from exploding somewhere in Los Angeles (which, by the way, he's really sucking at this season). Who needs the pressure?
Well, apparently, musicians do. Or about 300 of them, at least. That's right: over 300 bands have signed up to participate in this year's ""RPM Challenge,"" a website sponsored contest—sort of—that challenges everyday music-makers to write, record, edit and produce an entire album in the month of February. The reason I say it's ""sort of"" a contest is that there are no winners or losers when the Challenge ends—there's just a whole lot of new music in the world, which means everyone's a winner, particularly the participating artists, because they walk away with a finished product.
Now, whether or not the finished product is any good is anyone's guess. Since most of these musicians are non-professional they most likely don't have access to a professional studio. This isn't necessarily detrimental—The Mountain Goats' first albums sound like they were recorded inside of a tin can with Macaulay Culkin's Talkboy. Some people treasure basement tapes, demos, etc. of their favorite artists: My own father has Grateful Dead bootlegs that are so faded and crappy that it sounds like the person taping the show was doing so from a bordering county. And how often do music snobs complain about an album being ""overproduced""—too slick and shiny, like the new iPhone [which looks really cool, by the way, no matter what the naysayers say (which is ""nay"")].
So the actual quality of the recording won't necessarily be a problem. But what about that damn deadline? Can you really just whip up an entire album in a month?
Ryan Adams recorded an album called 48 Hours in, well, 48 hours, and, despite the fact that it was never officially released, it's pretty great. Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (which might possibly, maybe, potentially, perhaps be my all-time favorite album) was recorded in something like three or four days—the songs had already been written or were at least partially developed before then, obviously, but let's face it: any real musician is going to have song ideas floating around in their head 24/7. The same goes for Neil Young's recent protest album, Living With War, which—get this—was recorded in six days, during one of which Young wrote and recorded four songs. Please Please Me, the Beatles' very first album, was recorded in—if you believe the legend—585 minutes. Time means nothing.
I happen to think this challenge is great. It puts to bed the myth of the divinely inspired artist—the one who wakes up in an almost violent frenzy and scribbles down some notes on a piece of paper by his bed and then uses them to record some brilliant song the next day in the studio. It's not that this doesn't happen—""Yesterday"" and ""When the Stars Go Blue"" were supposedly written in just this fashion, but they're the exception to the rule.
Most songwriting, like any other art form, is the product of practice, trial and error and hard work. And this challenge asks artists to roll up their sleeves, pick up their guitar (or Moog or kazoo or what have you), and get to work without the divine inspiration from a muse. Divine inspiration from JA¤germeister, though, is probably strongly encouraged.
So, local Madison bands, here is your mission if you choose to accept it: produce 10 songs, or 35 minutes of new music, written and recorded in and only in the month of February. Visit www.rpmchallenge.com for more information, including where to send your work when you're done with it. The website will post all entries so your music can be shared around the world by fellow musicians and future fans alike. If you fail, a bomb will go off somewhere in Los Angeles in the next six hours—so get to it.
