I’m not sure about new music. Actually, I am. The majority of it sucks. It’s got no soul, no drive. It’s a bunch of poppy teen angst rolled up into a highly produced package and marketed to teeny boppers who will pay whatever they are told for the music they are told to listen to. It’s not music you can drive down the highway screaming after a breakup. Its not music you can blast at a rally. Its not even music you can see in concert. Its processed, like the artists that make it and the producers that produce it. Simply put, its shit.
My brother and I had a lengthy conversation tonight on the way home from a Modern Subject rehearsal. The topic – where has the real music gone? Gone are the days of raw rock ‘n roll, of gut wrenching guitars and vocals that even the best person in your college vocal ensemble couldn’t wail if they were on acid. No today’s music is toned – its mediated – its controlled from a sterile room by a producer with $1000 bills in his pocket. If it can be done on synth, do it on synth. If it can be faked, fake it. If it can be cleaned up with cutting and pasting and a shitload of reverb, then do it in post. God forbid we let musicians be musicians and portray music the way its meant to be portrayed – open, honest, raw, gutsy, and untamed.
What happened to the music of the generation? Previous youth had The Beatles, The Who, The Doors, The Stones, Dylan, U2, hell, even Oasis. But where’s the music of THIS generation? Where’s our protest songs? We have the economy going to shit, a black president coming into power, worldwide terrorist turmoil, an environmental meltdown, and a vast majority who don’t give a flying f**k. WHAT IS THERE NOT TO PROTEST? Yet the only voice I hear is a pretentious, abnoxious rapper named Kanye West screaming at me that his music about “screwing bitches” and “beatin’ hoes” is somehow the voice of my generation. No thanks you arrogant asshole. I want MY music back. I want music with soul, music that keeps me up at night. I want to believe so much in a song that I feel it could change the world. I want music for a revolution.
Pop music makes me sick. It really does. I rarely if ever listen to the radio – it depresses me. The music awards was a friggin circus this year. Everyone could have gotten everyone else’s award and everyone knew that no one deserved any of it. The bands and artists of this year probably won’t be here next, nor will their music, which thank God, fades away quicker than they do. I swear, if I heard a teenager singing Britney Spears in 30 years I would crap my pants. It just won’t happen. And its not just that she sucks, or that she’s drama, or that her claim to fame is her cleavage and not her music. It’s all of that…combined – and more. That’s why she won’t last. And neither will any of these other fly by night, built by Sony wonder-acts. They’re around to make a quick buck and the gone, meanwhile a whole generation sits there and has to pick between Kanye West and Panic at the Disco to represent them to the world.
Music isn’t about life anymore. Its not about struggles, or pitfalls, the world, happenings…hell, even women. It’s about personal drama and how you feel about it. You don’t hear an “Under My Thumb” anymore, a “Talking ‘Bout My Generation,” even a “Wonderwall.” You hear who some guy screwed and how he feels about it. Maybe its me, but I don’t give a shit. I need more. I need rock. Rock ‘n roll is a mentality, a character, it’s even a swagger. But its not just a type of music – its a type of life. A life that wants things raw…how they’re meant to be. Unpolished. Unproduced. Like you just heard a new band playing in their garage and you’re so into it you park in the drive way kind of raw. That’s when talent comes through. It’s not when you throw a crappy singer through 40 different pitch processors until you get a clean note, its when a singer is so freaking good that a pitch processer wigs out and makes it sound worse.
I long for a Dylan – a writer for the people. A writer that isn’t afraid to stand in front of the most powerful person in the world, and say “Guess what? I wrote a song for you. It’s called “Go to Hell, Asshole!” And just when you think they couldn’t possibly have the metal to go further….they strap on a guitar and sing the first chorus for them…in front of 15,000 fans. That’s who I want…not some spandex-clad bimbo telling a group of 20,000 horny freshman that she’ll be a slave for them.
Music has sold its soul to the devil for a 23 song album and a 3 minute video. It’s flooded our iPods with instructions how to think, how to act, what to buy, when to piss, and when to roll over and die. And its everywhere. MTV doesn’t play music anymore…neither does VH1. You gotta dig way up into the 400 channels to find Paladia, and hope they’re not playing that AC/DC concert rerun. You can’t even find good music anymore.
My generation wants its music back. No. Scratch that. We want our music for the first time. We want to be so emotionally involved with a song that we tell people to piss off while we listen to the album again – for the 5th time. We need artists like The Strokes, The Kooks, and Delta Spirit to completely overtake the charts and not to be confined by some half-assed Indie radio station that plays a poppy track for the sake of profiling. Then we need emerging artists to hear these bands, and say, “I wanna say that too….but louder!” That is where it comes from, from the drive, the need, yea, the unquenchable thirst to take a thought, contemplate it until it burns a hole in your brain, and scream it out the sunroof on the 405 freeway at 1am……and then record it to 2 inch tape.
I may be dreaming….or rather foreshadowing, as I’ve yet to see it happen….but I have hope. I have hope that music can be saved. I believe that if enough people experience real music, real rock….not this Fall Out Boy disco rock obsession sweeping the charts-but real, unadulterated rock, that something will click. Something will set off a bomb in these modern day poets. That they’ll turn their attention away from their closet of despare, and outward toward the world that is crying out for representation. And on that day, we will have our Dylan, our Jagger, our Lennon…until then, well, there’s always records….
