It seems like in a lot of cases, when we talk about truth and honesty, especially when it comes to artistic expression, we are talking about the nature of those primordial, subterranean emotional movements that take place in the older regions of our brains.
Making honest music then has to do with channeling what those landscapes have to tell us. This is by no means an easy task: we often talk about the sweetness of passionate expression while ignoring the great horrors that have to be reckoned with in the process of reaching such expression.
It is far easier to traverse such dreadful landscapes - or attempt to erase their existence altogether - by encircling them with reassuring symbolic narratives that attempt to make sense of this strange universe of ours, preferrably symbolic narratives that have already been created by some poor sucker doing the heavy lifting of building a fresh narrative atop his or her own experiences of those elemental emotional realities. That way one doesn't have to face bare reality head-on.
I would venture the argument that recorded music is a sort of symbol.Thus we have countless artists constructing their work in accordance with some celebrated coherent musical system. The accumulation of such activity produces genre. So let's say I worship a certain metal, or punk, or folk artist in particular and wish to recreate that feeling and that aesthetic wholesale in my own work. If you examine the lives of these pioneering artists, you usually find that they are tortured characters who probably had to come to terms with their own nature lest they be destroyed, and ended up doing that by expressing that nature honestly with the birth of a new musical idea. That leaves a musical artifact that can be conveniently plucked up by others, which can then reproduce many of the emotions and contemplation that gave birth to the original work. Those who borrow these ideas then don't have to touch those creative fires that gave birth to the ideas in the first place.
Don't get me wrong: lots of excellent music can be construed as echoes of an old idea. And who wants to subject his or herself to that all-consuming fire if it is unnecessary to live a good life?
But then there's a slight problem. With every repeated borrowing of that old idea, the idea itself undergoes a sort of decay in material space. We get waves of good echoes until the echoes weaken to a point of us experiencing them as "contrivances" and "lies", possibly because each of these echoes percolates into finer and finer subcultures, and so a once universal language becomes fragmented and communication dies. And so a new idea has to be generated, most likely at the point at which feeling alone and being under the impression that one is living a lie is more painful than thrusting oneself back into the emotional inferno in search of that salvation which is the experience of unity or absolute good, or what we sometimes call "truth".
Making honest music means always fighting demons. Being in doubt, being afraid, hesitant, unsure, desperate, alone and more...all of these emotions accompany the experience of leaving the comfort of our shared symbolic reality and trudging into the unknown. One can channel one's heroes: past musical greats that have gone through the same process and brought back musical expression in its various forms, musical expression that reflects the greater truths of a given epoch, but in the end one is alone to express one's own subjectivity in one's own time.
Honest music isn't necessarily good music. One sometimes has an overpowering fear that the noise pouring fourth from one's fingers and instrument is just a manifestation of madness...a sonic manifestation of the fact that one has become lost and has succumbed to one's demons. Always a possibility, and a danger. And so maybe one's honest music is madness. Another possibility to consider however is finding truth and being able to share that truth with others, and so the honest music becomes good music. It makes the risk worthwhile. Hell, some even like to listen to the sounds of madness, and call it good and valuable. I sometimes have a taste for such things. To each his own as the tired saying goes.
To drive all of this rambling home, let's take an example from another discipline. Ernest Hemmingway has two related quotes concerning these matters when it comes to writing:
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
This first quote seems reassuring. Truth! That's easy. But when it comes to articulating the truth, and in the social sphere no less, it becomes apparent that it is not so easy. And we come to realize the truth of the second related quote:
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
I could go on and on with examples spanning cultures and disciplines. Perhaps I could produce one thousand examples. Yes there is even a theory that systematically takes note of just this sort of phenomena. Joseph Campbell calls it a "monomyth". As it happens, it is something that happens.
