The staff over at Kiko Jones (my favorite music blog, since GodIHateYourBand only works fro 2:13-2:19am on Sunday nights) brings up a good point about music today, a la whatever happened to protest music? I know 40 years ago there were plenty of dummy love songs et al as well, but there were also many, many great songs about our social atmosphere at any given time. Songs about race, class, culture, war, poverty, on and on. And before you say "But Xmastime", in that Craig Ironhead Heyward voice during those soap commercials, "there's plenty of songs like that today, you just have to find them!" Yeah, but that's my point - I shouldn't have to find look hard to find them. I realize that "music for the masses" also doesn't mean what it once did, but turn on any radio station or tv channelt or show that has anything to do with music that is popular today, and you get one of two things: the white indie/emo/skatepunk band who is desperatly trying to convince you they are more fey and broken-hearted than the last white indie/emo/skatepunk band, and then the hip-hop faux-thug showing his bling and ho's in a hot tub (I'm not even bothering with the teeny-bopper Miley Cyrus types.) We're in the middle of a fake war costing us trillions of dollars, our jobs are getting shipped overseas, we have an almost absurdly corrupt adminsitration and as a country we have lost a ton of swerve with the rest of the world. Where's the rock band that's outraged by any of this? Nobody with a guitar has been even mildly touched by any of this? No? It's all just more "I saw you in the library, but you like the high school quarterback, now I'm gonna cry in a Black Flag t-shirt" songs over and over? Really? Is there a band out there making music heard by more than 7 people that hasn't spent their entire lives in a Cinnabon at the mall?
And black artists are doing no better. Instead of running around my tv screen with no shirt on bragging that you've been shot 19 times, how bout a song asking "Why the fuck have I been shot 19 times?" Not even curious? Really? Everything's great out there? Jay-Z can get excited enough by American Gangster to come out of "retirement" with an album but can't get out of his pajamas for Katrina? Really? With all due respect to Michael Jordan, I guess Jay-Z knows that Republicans buy hip-hop albums too.
I know I'm spitting in the wind, sounding like an old man here. And I know that within minutes my music geek friends will pummel me with some track Ghostface Killah has about being unhappy. Wonderful. But for John Q. Public flipping on his radio in his Hyundai, he aint hearing it, and neither am I. A while back I lamented re: why is the only person putting out albums and singing songs of actual protest who is already at the peak of the music industry Bruce Springsteen?
Why is a 60 year-old millionaire doing the work of those half his age and a hundredth of his bank account?
Anyway. New season of The Real World is on, so I gotta focus. You understand.
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