Well, let's be fair - it's very well put together, produced and performed shit.
I'm sure the music consultants hugely enjoyed coming up with these pseudo-bootleg song combinations.
Perfectly assembled karaoke, without any air or individuality or real emotion or purpose beyond making the show's creators as much money as possible.
Meanwhile, real musicians who are trying to earn a living and maybe even push music forward get muscled out of the charts by the Glee and Cowell plagues.
Easy to go all Meldrew and Kids Today - so let's do it!
Kids Today just want slash fan fiction photocopies. They don't want originality, don't understand anything about feel or emotion or the danger without which music isn't worth making, can't grasp complexity or ambiguity or anything that doesn't go BANG BANG BANG.
So something like "Everybody Hurts" - whatever the hell that's supposed to do with Haiti - gets through to 453,000 people because of this willed absence, this inability or unwillingness to get to grips which anything that isn't baby simple.
Perhaps the saddest thing I've read recently was someone on Popular recently who said that they preferred listening to "soulless music."
Back in the mid-eighties, that wasn't what we meant.
When we rankled against Soul, Passion and Honesty in Capital Letters it was against the aesthetic tyranny which seemed to insist that that style was the only approach worth considering, that if it wasn't "authentic" - and few things are less authentic than, say, "Let It Be" by Ferry Aid - then it was worthless. This didn't mean we wanted "soulless music" - anyone who imagines something like "Acid Tracks" to be soulless isn't listening properly. But "Soul" as received wisdom (received from whom?), as a gesture of...what, exactly, other than what was fashionable in 1986/7?...that was a fulsome and deserving target.
Plenty of the real stuff around at the moment, though, so my advice is to hibernate from the chart for the next 6-9 months until the Glee typhoon has blown over. It's the only way to stay sane.
All of it is shit.
Well, let's be fair - it's very well put together, produced and performed shit.
I'm sure the music consultants hugely enjoyed coming up with these pseudo-bootleg song combinations.
Perfectly assembled karaoke, without any air or individuality or real emotion or purpose beyond making the show's creators as much money as possible.
Meanwhile, real musicians who are trying to earn a living and maybe even push music forward get muscled out of the charts by the Glee and Cowell plagues.
Easy to go all Meldrew and Kids Today - so let's do it!
Kids Today just want slash fan fiction photocopies. They don't want originality, don't understand anything about feel or emotion or the danger without which music isn't worth making, can't grasp complexity or ambiguity or anything that doesn't go BANG BANG BANG.
So something like "Everybody Hurts" - whatever the hell that's supposed to do with Haiti - gets through to 453,000 people because of this willed absence, this inability or unwillingness to get to grips which anything that isn't baby simple.
Perhaps the saddest thing I've read recently was someone on Popular recently who said that they preferred listening to "soulless music."
Back in the mid-eighties, that wasn't what we meant.
When we rankled against Soul, Passion and Honesty in Capital Letters it was against the aesthetic tyranny which seemed to insist that that style was the only approach worth considering, that if it wasn't "authentic" - and few things are less authentic than, say, "Let It Be" by Ferry Aid - then it was worthless. This didn't mean we wanted "soulless music" - anyone who imagines something like "Acid Tracks" to be soulless isn't listening properly. But "Soul" as received wisdom (received from whom?), as a gesture of...what, exactly, other than what was fashionable in 1986/7?...that was a fulsome and deserving target.
Plenty of the real stuff around at the moment, though, so my advice is to hibernate from the chart for the next 6-9 months until the Glee typhoon has blown over. It's the only way to stay sane.
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