Make Your Own Rules

by Andrew Huang

On growing up Chinese in Canada: “I rejected the Chinese culture I came from, and I rejected the Canadian culture around me and not letting me in.” “It was rare for the immigrant kids to find the same depth of community among each other, because our backgrounds and experiences were all mixed up. What we shared was our otherness, not a common ground but an absence of it. We were planets without suns, drifting alone.” (20)

He stopped celebrating his own birthday (22), being “hyperaware of how many ideas of judgements were simply made up by others.” This is part of giving up culture – traditions are cultural.

Traditions can bind us together. When we invite others into them, they can enlarge our world and strengthen friendships. But they can also be a hedge separating one group from another. Not all bad – maintaining group identity, not becoming homogenous, is good. But can also lead to pointless exclusivity.

He describes “creating with whatever tools were available.” “This boombox has a microphone? Let’s go.” This is so much more limited than what we have on our phones, but it sounds freeing.

So much to relate to. The importance of a boombox with dual cassette decks – mine was a Sony, and I absolutely loved it. Collecting CDs in college, always looking for something new. Being a library junkie, looking through the stacks and archives for the extra-unusual. (30) “I was discovering all this on my own, driven by some urge to experience as much music as possible.” (31) Nobody else was into these things. A rejection of traditional forms and expectations – I feel like I just missed falling down this hole. “I began removing elements I’d been brought up to believe turned sounds into music: song structure, key signatures and time signatures, traditional instruments and traditional recording processes. Actually, why not jettison notes and rhythms entirely?” (31) Check out my new song, it’s a soup can full of roaches!

Some things I cannot related to – the isolation and drifting away from his family for a time.

“There’s a spectrum between pure silence and pure noise, and all the genres of music I love occupy the sweet spots somewhere in the middle – domains where it’s still possible to be original, even with all the customs and traditions and precedents. If you make it all the way to pure noise, you’re at the end of the road; there’s nowhere further to go. You have to turn around. And also: just like your identity, music that’s built on rejection doesn’t have much of anything in it.” (32)

“Uniqueness for its own sake is usually empty of substance, like serving a plate of twigs for dinner. Nobody else is doing this! Yes, we know. There are several good reasons for that.” (33)

“Throwing away your map and compass doesn’t mean north and south stop existing.” (33)

“Most traditional harmony was not actually arbitrarily decided by dead white guys. The pitch relationships that most people agree are pleasing to the ear are based on immutable properties of physics and math – they form the simplest possible ratios between two different rates of vibration.” (34)

“A completely steady, predictably beat becomes boring quickly, while irregular, unpredictable rhythms provide little for a listener to latch on to – we need that sweet spot. It comes from the same place as our enjoyment of story. We want continuity, but a bit of surprise – not a list of a predictable sequence of events, nor a string of non sequiturs.

“Being purely ’experimental’ was a way to hide that I was directionless and uncommitted.” (36)

On pages 49-54, there’s a comic strip he made on the computer which he once used in a job application… and got the job!

The Songs to Wear Pants To story picks up on page 61. He auctioned a custom song on ebay, and the girl who won asked if she could sing on it. So he sent her a backing track, and she sang a song about her hamster – extremely poorly recorded! But he layered her vocals in as best he could, and she was thrilled. He started auctioning songs for money and also started STWPT.

On p. 63, he turned in a completely random sheet of notes for a music composition class. It got the same grade as something he had worked pretty hard on. So he transfered out of the classical composition program.

My own thoughts about collaboration: I’m not bad at this, but I avoid it. I have trouble trusting others creatively or trusting myself under time contraints.

Being passionate, open, and encouraged leads to contribution.

On streaming, etc.: “Convenience has superceded everything: the specialness of a packaged physical artifact, the excitement of hunting for a rare track, even the actual sound quality of the music itself.” (131)