video really did kill the radio star

musical musings and solutions for a saturday morning

preface and dedication:

this is not my fault. i had things to do this morning. but i have a dear friend and longtime inadvertent but oddly inescapable muse who in response to the core idea we’ll get to here suggested the title and i have been writing since.

this is her fault.

so there.

i want to show you some video from my youth

take a quick watch

it’s just three videos

and now, at the risk of sounding like an engagement farmer, let me pose a question:

what do you notice about these videos?

in particular, what do you notice that makes them seem dramatically different from the music and the videos of today?

give this some real thought.

there will be a test.

i ask this in service of answering a question:

why does music today suck so much?

i say this not as the archetypical grumpy oldster clinging to his chords and crooners and grousing about “the kids today and their damnable new fangled noise.” i say this as an objectivist. music today objectively sucks. there are a few bright spots here and there, but basically, it’s just awful, derivative twaddle with no soul and less swagger.

you know how you can prove this is true?

listen to the music everywhere you go.

apart from at actual dance clubs, you will basically never hear any music recorded after 2005 in any bar, restaurant, or other meeting place. it doesn’t matter how young the crowd is. maybe you’ll catch some newer house music in low key fashion here or there, but boil most of that down and it’s all riffing on and derivative of older music.

even the kids today know their music sucks. ask them. my friends kids are listening to the same music we listened to in high school. one such youngling when i asked what they were listening to told me “it’s this obscure band, you never heard of them.”

“humor me,” says i.

“they’re called ‘the cure.’”

it’s difficult not to laugh oneself to tears.

but, of course…

so you introduce them to new order and siouxsie and the banshees and saunter off having happily placed the mentos into sprite that fertilize the seeds of the next generation of proper teen angst.

but, of course, this work is not done.

because music basically died.

think back to all the rapid evolutions of music.

you had classical.

classical begat jazz.

jazz begat blues.

blues begat rock and roll.

rock and roll begat a dizzying array of progeny from metal to the vast and creative diaspora of the 80’s from queen to depeche mode, from led zeppelin to the denouement of GnR with the doors and cars and glam rock of duran duran all along for the scintillating, glittering ride of the police and talking heads. prince, journey, blondie, the go gos and the pet shop boys, bon jovi, dire straights, REM. it was an explosive moment of massively multidirectional creative outpouring from the driving insistence of pat benetar to the reflective intellectualism of the cure to the bouncy fun weirdness of culture club. even punk flourished from generation X to the clash and mainstream like idol and the cult.

the beasties bridged us and the 90’s brought us hip hop and the glories of tribe called quest and naughty by nature, young MC and the rap movement of snoop and dre and biggie.

it brought us nirvana grunge rock from seattle and bands like sublime and the chillis. the 90’s saw electronica and house music surge into full flower and a tiny rave and dance party subculture go mainstream.

it was good.

hell, it was glorious. every week saw something new and enticing.

then what?

it all just fricking ended.

the music died.

bye-bye, went the american vibe.

(and the UK too. let’s not forget them.)

from vast riches of the novel and provocative, we sank to abject poverty.

who since 2005 is even in a class with those above?

what is new?

where is the genre being born, the new way, the new sound?

who is pushing boundaries like bowie and turning heads like the stones?

where did the music go?

i have a theory and my theory is this:

those starting the new genres were pioneers and virtuosos from the old genres. the seminal jazz musicians were all classically trained. they had a vast pool of influence and skill to draw from and they brought it new direction in a new mode. but then came the jazz musicians who had only ever played jazz. they had nothing new to bring and so it became derivative, then recursive, then stale.

and jazz died.

rock too started with the classically trained. eddie van halen was a legit musical prodigy. he played i have no idea how many instruments. these people were serious musicians seeking the new and pushing into new spheres. the 80’s had 100 “types” of music and things that were hard to even define.

newness and innovation drove newness and innovation, a vast jungle of hybrid flowers exploding into bloom and cross-pollinating one another.

the police played ska.

the chilis picked it up and made it an altogether new sound.

what do we have today? regaton? it’s garbage (and i live in its home world. trust me. it’s garbage rapidly ripening into soil salting compost from which nothing may germinate and will soon be forgotten.)

there is nothing.

there is nothing because music is product.

it became pure product, produced by product managers with hand picked performers chosen to dance and vamp and papered over with autotune and post-production. it’s music by committee and front folks by casting call.

damn near all of them are just stage performers. all the money is in concert tours now. it’s about flying over the crowd on your fairy chariot and packing in the kids.

it’s fricking disney.

and rock and roll that ain’t.

it’s also hideously uncreative, arch-conservative, play-it-safe marketing as lacking in gritty realism as it is in fun.

it starts to take on the repetitive aspects of a compulsory floor routine.

nothing grows from that, nothing flourishes, nothing changes.

you cannot sharpen jello on jello.

i don’t mean to pick on tay-tay, who really is a serious performer and (at least early on) wrote some great songs (big fan of “love story” even the video which has a fun 80’s energy to it (albeit an overly airbrushed one)) but like madonna before her, a once interesting and genuine performer and writer fell into “product twaddle” and smeared her output into a sort of non-distinct miasma of merchandise with all the soul of tax accountancy.

who today would walk out on stage looking like freddy and belt out a tune like this that sounds like no other song you ever heard with no auto-tune and just let the notes fall where they may?

and what music of today can you love that you love like this?

the same people who have wrecked movies by making them timid, crap, and derivative with every new release a tepid remake or a sequel of a sequel of a sequel have their hands around the creative throat of music and have choked it into hideous obedience.

where one stood gods of rock now resides sacrifice upon the altar of mediocrity.

even the “new versions of old songs” (even those which are good, and many are) are all recursive and derivative. the surfhouse version of “country roads” slaps, but that song is older than i am. (amusingly so old that many kids today think it’s original, basically a reprise of the “did you know paul mccartney was in a band before ‘wings’”joke)

we feel like scroungers living in the ruins of a civilization of long-departed titans and wondering how to build the things they once conjured with ease.

because we are.

it’s a sad state of affairs, stripped of poignance and bereft of promise.

and so i offer a simple solution:

(it’s also the answer to my “what do you notice?” question above)

if you want to bring back music from this godawful slop we’re currently producing:

we need to let ugly people sing again.

that’s it.

that’s all.

stop starting with “how will they look on stage and in video shorts?” and get back to the music for the music’s sake, not for the sake of butts in seats.

the venn intersection of “super buff, super disciplined, gorgeous, epic dancer who will do what they are told by the product manager” and “talented singer-songwriter” is already near zero. add a third overlap of “creative boundary pusher” or “actually embodies any rock and roll ethos” and you’re basically at null set.

radio as contagion vector is ugly agnostic.

video is not.

and it has stripped us of the builders.

we’re taking all the actually creative rebels and calling them unemployable by the music machine. they are not gone, we just relegated them to the sidelines in favor of superficial potemkin performers with nothing underneath but spanx and tape.

and we need those real rebels back.

they are the vital, beating heart of rock and roll. and we need to kick-start that heart back into still beating.

and until we do, we’ll never even know what can come next.

because this is a road to nowhere.

we have just stopped believin'.

and its time to fight for our right to have music again.

to do this, we likely need to rethink the current structure of music access. streaming is death. it’s a couple of big gatekeepers that take most of the money and mean that anyone not a megastar lives in penury. there are no “album sales” anymore. it’s streaming as marketing to drive concert revenue.

i doubt you can fix it within the current structure.

we need to be willing to pay.

if you don’t pay for music, it’s going to suck.

and apart from a few mega-merchandisers, you will never have albums, only (at best) singles. (and desperate singles at that)

i suspect there is a meaningful full-royalty-to-the-song-creator model rooted in a peer-to-peer system more like the original napster but without having to have all the music resident on your drive out there somewhere waiting to be worked out.

whatever the path, we need to find it.

we need to find it for all media.

because what we have now just plain sucks.

there used to be more good songs and movies in a year in the 80’s than you get in a decade now.

nothing is gone.

only forgotten.

and it wants us to remember.