Today I figured it out.
I get it.
I finally understand why modern popular music sucks.
It all began with the recent nominal spike in the Major League Baseball steroid scandal. I thought, you know, it’s a damn good thing that performance enhancing drugs aren’t banned in music like they are in sports. Think of all the wonderful music that drugs have brought us. The creative process has a long history with the entheogens-and it’s produced some wonderful and spiritually profound examples (and, I imagine, some awful ones; but this is, after all, war, and there will be casualties). It would be a true shame to have conservative order (Restriction!) forced upon expressive genius. I’m not saying that the heroin was good for Kurt Cobain, but I will suggest that it was good for his art. I mean, can you imagine a world in which bands like Pink Floyd and The Who would have to stay sober to produce their music?
Why not there but in the MLB? We’re certainly not talking about the same drugs (except maybe for drummers). The missing aspect is competition. If bands were competing against each other for supremacy in an arena, where success is half your victory and half your opponent's defeat, those with the advantages of psychedelics would be considered to have an unfair edge. Granted, in a capitalist system, all occupation becomes a competition of commerce-but the arena is missing. I don’t care if an artist I like outsells or is outsold by another, but I KNOW the Yankees suck.
But then, I think back to that ever so humbling moment, when I first activated my new iPod, and saw that the largest default playlist was “90s Music.” I haven’t ever purchased a song online; in the past year I’ve purchased maybe three CDs-after college I sold over 300 CDs, and I still had almost 200 left. At first, I just thought it was the beginning of the dreaded “unhipness,” a lack of touch with what was in. I am, after all, almost 30. But I knew that couldn’t be-I’d never been hip to begin with.
And then, with a lightning flash an alcoholic might call a moment of clarity or a mystic an epiphany, I saw it. Music now sucks because of American Idol, and the entry of large-scale competition in the music world. Artists, even those outside that overblown talent show, are no longer faces in an album jacket photo-they are musical athletes. And mine is better than yours. Artists must be loved, be good role models-or suffer the fate of Britney and Lindsey. They must be pure, and in present-day America, pure means sober. Or fucked-up within the law.
Keith Richards wouldn’t have lived to be his current age had he been born in 1982. He might have been able to withstand the drugs just as well, but not the pressure that the media places upon it’s failures and dissidents these days. Do you remember when Lindsey Lohan was the cute girl in the Herbie movie? Can you believe that Britney Spears was once a Mouseketeer? Don’t get me wrong-I’m not saying they didn’t do it to themselves, or even that they don’t deserve it. But I am saying that many of the greats of yesterday would not survive in the modern America creative environment. Either the creativity wouldn’t have been there, or they would have been marginalized, or even destroyed by the Janus of American Idol-comebacks are not permitted once the scorn of the audience has been earned. The major media is fighting an all-out war against the super-skinny cocaine models of the 80s and 90s, yet when Britney had her attempted comeback at the MTV Music awards, one of the most common complaints was that she was fat.
When you take performance enhancing drugs out of music, you get N*Sync and other prissy, clean and uncreative corporate dance-floor filler. A young Joe Cocker or Bob Dylan would be laughed off the stage that now suffers a worshipped Justin Timberlake.
Civilization is crumbling.
I finally understand why modern popular music sucks.
It all began with the recent nominal spike in the Major League Baseball steroid scandal. I thought, you know, it’s a damn good thing that performance enhancing drugs aren’t banned in music like they are in sports. Think of all the wonderful music that drugs have brought us. The creative process has a long history with the entheogens-and it’s produced some wonderful and spiritually profound examples (and, I imagine, some awful ones; but this is, after all, war, and there will be casualties). It would be a true shame to have conservative order (Restriction!) forced upon expressive genius. I’m not saying that the heroin was good for Kurt Cobain, but I will suggest that it was good for his art. I mean, can you imagine a world in which bands like Pink Floyd and The Who would have to stay sober to produce their music?
Why not there but in the MLB? We’re certainly not talking about the same drugs (except maybe for drummers). The missing aspect is competition. If bands were competing against each other for supremacy in an arena, where success is half your victory and half your opponent's defeat, those with the advantages of psychedelics would be considered to have an unfair edge. Granted, in a capitalist system, all occupation becomes a competition of commerce-but the arena is missing. I don’t care if an artist I like outsells or is outsold by another, but I KNOW the Yankees suck.
But then, I think back to that ever so humbling moment, when I first activated my new iPod, and saw that the largest default playlist was “90s Music.” I haven’t ever purchased a song online; in the past year I’ve purchased maybe three CDs-after college I sold over 300 CDs, and I still had almost 200 left. At first, I just thought it was the beginning of the dreaded “unhipness,” a lack of touch with what was in. I am, after all, almost 30. But I knew that couldn’t be-I’d never been hip to begin with.
And then, with a lightning flash an alcoholic might call a moment of clarity or a mystic an epiphany, I saw it. Music now sucks because of American Idol, and the entry of large-scale competition in the music world. Artists, even those outside that overblown talent show, are no longer faces in an album jacket photo-they are musical athletes. And mine is better than yours. Artists must be loved, be good role models-or suffer the fate of Britney and Lindsey. They must be pure, and in present-day America, pure means sober. Or fucked-up within the law.
Keith Richards wouldn’t have lived to be his current age had he been born in 1982. He might have been able to withstand the drugs just as well, but not the pressure that the media places upon it’s failures and dissidents these days. Do you remember when Lindsey Lohan was the cute girl in the Herbie movie? Can you believe that Britney Spears was once a Mouseketeer? Don’t get me wrong-I’m not saying they didn’t do it to themselves, or even that they don’t deserve it. But I am saying that many of the greats of yesterday would not survive in the modern America creative environment. Either the creativity wouldn’t have been there, or they would have been marginalized, or even destroyed by the Janus of American Idol-comebacks are not permitted once the scorn of the audience has been earned. The major media is fighting an all-out war against the super-skinny cocaine models of the 80s and 90s, yet when Britney had her attempted comeback at the MTV Music awards, one of the most common complaints was that she was fat.
When you take performance enhancing drugs out of music, you get N*Sync and other prissy, clean and uncreative corporate dance-floor filler. A young Joe Cocker or Bob Dylan would be laughed off the stage that now suffers a worshipped Justin Timberlake.
Civilization is crumbling.