One of the fundamental questions in Art - and therefore in music, too - is often posed: What is Beauty?
Art has for most of (documented) history been concerned with Beauty: from pyramids and tombs to castles and portraits of Kings and Queens, to Churches, we think of Art as an attempt to create or represent the Beautiful.
A philosopher named Immanuel Kant proposed, though, that one should distinguish between Art which is merely "pleasurable" from Art which is truly "aesthetically pleasing". A simple way to explain this is Pornography: it is Art, but it also (maybe primarily) serves a different purpose. Another example could be a luxurious meal: it is "pleasing" and "beautiful" but only because the "audience" has an ulterior motive in appraising it - namely the fact that they are hungry or horny (or both).
We clearly aren't as prudish as people were in Kant's day, but his distinction between different motivations and modes of enjoyment are still relavent. We can take some interesting bits from books by "old white guys" without ascribing some superhuman intellect to them. Most Philosophers (like most Artists and musicians) only become famous or well-known by pure chance - often just because they were the first person to publish a given idea.
Kant proposed, apart from this distinction between merely "pleasurable" and "aesthetically pleasing", a different value in Art: not Beauty, but what he called the Sublime.
An often given example of the Sublime is an enormous typhoon wave during a hurricane: Seeing it approach us, we are terrified, and yet we also may be unable to look away, mesmerized by the Sublime power of Nature herself. Another example could be serial killers: they are terrifying and monstrous, but we are nonetheless fascinated and drawn to learning about all of the gorey details because there is some kind of Sublime, Transcendental aspect to the morbidity of it - the stark, brute fact or mortality and the fragility of life.
It is these ideas that inform the way Art changed in modernity. Artists began to move away from the idea that art and music had to represent beauty, but that it could also (much like theatre and literature had done for their entire existence) represent and portray fear, suffering, anger, and all of the various emotions that make up the human experience.
When we think of it, it is kind of strange that Music specifically has so long been "bogged down" by a need to be "beautiful" and "pleasant", when so many other forms of Art have had no problem with and are even expected to handle ugly and negative emotions. Why is it that Music specifically is so rigid? Why is it that music must use a specific set of twelve notes? Why is it that we can enjoy a Tragedy in literature or film, but "tragic" music is something we don't tend to like listening to? In so many other forms of aesthetics, there is wild experimentation in formal structure, but with music the basic elements of melody, harmony, pitch and rhythm have remained largely unchanged for so long?
These are just some questions to consider.
With the prevalence and growing affordability of music production hardware and software in the past decades more people than ever before have been able to write, record and produce their own music. This is awesome!
Making music can be therepeutic and relaxing, as with any form of art. It can be rewarding as one learns new skills and techniques for their craft.
CGRU/cybergrunge tends to draw outsider artists and avant-garde musicians, ranging from breakcore, noise music, experimental music and so on. These categories allow much broader freedom of expression, and for the current author were liberating and cathartic to become involved with.
Picasso is quoted as having said "Learn the rules so that you can break them"
CGRU/cybergrunge responds "make your own rules, learn from others, and keep creating"