Thomas J. West Music

Since January 1st, 2008, Parry Gripp has been writing and performing one (sometimes two) songs a week and posting them on Parry Gripp dot com. He is the epitome of what I like to call the "21st Century Artist".  With the ability for any person to reach a world-wide audience, combined with the nearly-instant access to material, Parry Gripp shows us some of the traits necessary to garner attention of a large audience.

Learn more about Parry Grip on his Wikipedia entry.

Gripp's Musical Content

In terms of musicality, Parry Gripps songs tend to have a punk pop feel (due to his association with the punk pop band Nerf Herder). The songs range from 30 to 90 seconds, and have a very simple topic, form, and harmonic structure. The songs lyrics address simple, often silly topics in pop culture, and are written to be linked around the internet as memes. He has become a master of meme music.

While his songs tend to be very simple, the pallate of sounds and the orchestration is not. Gripp's songs are remarkably textured, with anywhere between 5 to 20 instrumental sounds and effects used on every songs. There is obvious skill in composition there as well as the technical experience to throw together layered sounds in the timeline of 7 days.

Gripp's Use Of The Web

The secret to Parry Gripp's success is his masterful use of the distribution tools of the internet. His website is stark and simple - a simple list of each of his songs of the week stretching all the way back to the beginning, with simple links to the cover art for easy use on your site (like I did above), easy access to his iTunes collection, easy access to full recordings of the music, etc. Gripp freely shares all of it, knowing that the more traffic he gets, the more folks will be buying a track on iTunes and clicking on a Google ad.

Parry even lets people make dirivative works of his songs on his Mega Mix page.

His YouTube channel is primarily another venue for his songs with the cover art displayed as the content of the video (with occasional suprises thrown in). Some of his songs are actually made into full videos, and he often uses crowdsourcing to get fans to contribute fan art, as in the video for Space Unicorn:

Parry's Facebook and MySpace pages are venues for fans to leave him comments and pictures. Currently, fans are submitting pictures on Facebook to be included in his next video entitled Robot Dog. Parry's Twitter feed is the place where he actually sounds off himself on matters trivial and not-so-trivial. Twitter seems to be his place to mingle with other people in the music industry.

Opportunities Outside Of Song Of The Week

Parry Gripp's work has garnered him some serious attention. As I know from working on my own website, opportunities you never could imagine for yourself tend to arrive in your email inbox when you are putting out work that interests people. Gripp composed several songs for Wawa's Hoagiefest in the style of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He also wrote the theme song for the Zanga Facebook app PetVille. He also wrote one of my kids' favorite theme songs, Super Hero Squad.

A Gateway Into A Life Of Creativity

The internet has made it possible for people to do what they love, share it with people who can relate, and receve opportunities to do more of what they love. The democratization of distribution is ushering in a new era of creativity, where the hobbyist can stand alongside the professional.

As a music educator, I am making it my focus to teach my students how to perform on their primary instrument and using that instrument as the gateway into a life of creativity. Creativity such as Parry Gripp's is something that all of us possess but are often trained out of. As I move forward, I am finding as many ways for my students to discover their own musical creativity and use both traditional and modern ways to share it with the world.

What the world needs now is more young people being taught to harness their own independent brilliance and use it to enrich their own lives. By association, their gifts will enrich everyone who comes in contact with their work and can relate to it. The "21st Century Artist" is one who personalizes their passion and shares it far and wide. That art can be musical, visual, or even simply social. Companies like Life Is Good is a great example of making art out of one simple concept.

What is your passion? Why are you keeping it a secret?

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by email