You know, when you catch Elvis Costello doing his thing back in the late 70's and early 80's, it really makes you wish you could play an instrument. Just because he's one of those fucking brilliant songmen and performers, but was practically a revolution in himself when he came out. Rock and roll hasn't had that in a long time. Costello, The Clash, The Ramones, and the beginning of the Great Rise of The Boss? It's ridiculous. Things never happen like that anymore -- Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails and Alice in Chains and so on? Still not as ridiculously amazing as the late 70's breakthrough. The 2000's Strokes/White Stripes/retro-rock breakthrough is definitely not even close. Those few years brought on an entire new shape of mainstream music, something as seperated from The Beatles as it was inspired by them.
And you can dance to The Clash, to Costello, to the Ramones, to the Born To Run Springsteen. So much more than to any other decade's breakthrough (although the entire reason The Strokes make music is to have people dance silly dances like The Carlton Dance).
It's kinda sad, when you think about how rock went from something fun to something dark and angsty, and the majority of mainstream rock still sounds like that.
And while we're at it, radio still sucks as hard as it ever has. Regular FM, I mean -- although for all the diversity of satellite radio, it still presents the same problem in that the playlists are always so limited and set on making a specific pattern. But FM radio has become something even more awful than ever -- I remember discovering FNX (Boston's Alternative Rock Station) one summer night (I remember it was definitely August, and I was going into my senior year), and being amazed by the music that they were playing, because it wasn't exactly the same as everything else that was being played. They also had much more interesting DJs.
Now?
They're basically the same fucking thing as CYY and other shitty New England rock stations. Going between the bands that most of the world will only recognize for one song because hey, that's all that got played during high-listener times, and playing a band that everybody knows and hates (STAIND!), because some meathead who listens to strictly rap except for the one time he spun his dial wrong and heard the shitty group gets all his buddies to request it.
Wow. What a run-on sentence. I know I sound like I'm full of too much bitter vitirol for a 19 year old, but bear with me, because I spent more time studying music and film history and production than I did anything else in high school. I have some idea what I'm talking about.
I'm looking at the Modern Rock Chart. For the first time, it's nearly full of bands that I actually LIKE. Green Day, Nine Inch Nails. Weezer, Beck, System Of A Down, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Queens Of The Stone Age. However, right out of the top 10, there's tons of bands who are not nearly as talented or original: Mudvayne, Chevelle (a band with potential, but I can't tell if they'll fulfill it), Seether, The Bravery. Then there's the bands that have rediscovered the synthesizer -- and have started writing shitty rock around it. How about we leave writing songs with synthesizers to Hot Hot Heat? And how about every retro-rock band less obviously take every single step they've made from The Strokes (think about it: the "organized garage chaos sound" re-exploded into rock after their debut, and all these bands picked up synthesizers after Nick Valensi played some oddly-tuned jazz guitar notes on Room On Fire -- which nobody's picked up on, by the way).
I can't imagine how many people I happen to be pissing off by writing this. But I imagine I can get a ton of people to agree with me on my next rant!
Modern rap is a dead life form whose carcass is being toted around as though it still is vital and breathing. It doesn't sound like anybody's even rapping originally anymore -- they're putting all their time into the backing track and not into what is going on in the verses -- this is kind of the antithesis of rap, isn't it? It's all become "hip-hop", where the beat means more than the lyrics. There's nothing as horrendously truthful as N.W.A. or as slick and well-put as early LL Cool J, and when the two most original groups today happen to be three white former punk-rockers and a group that has one whacked-out genius and a regular street hustler -- there's a problem. Five people should not have to be the ones pushing rap forward. It should be a large group of people. Ever since The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, rap became immediately stagnant. It became "money, cars, bitches" or "I'll shoot a fucker", which just so happens to be the two respective themes of B.I.G. and Shakur -- the life of money or the life of poverty, and although they both exposed and deepened these themes rather well, no one since then has tried very hard. Perhaps Jay-Z. But beyond that? Eminem? Give me a break. Eminem has been pushing the angst that Kurt Cobain brought into rock and roll ten years prior and sold it off as his own thing.
I knew rap was dead the moment I realized 50 Cent's major-label debut was missing one crucial ingredient: his sense of humor. Before being signed, 50 Cent was maybe the funniest rapper in rap; he didn't care who he offended in the business, and he'd roll loose on anybody if it worked. It made up for the lazy drawl that he calls his "flow" and that his lyrics beyond the jokes weren't all that great.
But once I made a couple listens through Get Rich or Die Trying and discovered that the only real jokes there were came in "Wanksta", which was much older than the album was, I figured out that there was no longer any hope at all for rap. When 50 Cent is forced to sell his "gangstaness" because that's what everyone else does, rap is dead. There's no new Public Enemy (because Zach De La Rocha won't finish his fucking album!), there's no rap group that really seems to use the DJ to a full effect (except for The Beastie Boys, but they were already mentioned for being one of the few people who have helped push rap forward), there's barely any real rap at all. It's all "studio gangstas" and "I got my record deal advance pimps".
I had begun to drop rap very quickly; 1997, thereabouts -- but I used to keep myself partially in that musical genre, because I was hoping there was still some brilliance there. Nowadays, a rap album doesn't really exist to me anymore, unless it's a new Outkast album.
Okay, I think this has been a long enough music rant. But I'll end it with one last little bite about the radio again, but this time from a hero of mine:
Radio is the sound of salvation/Radio is cleaning up the nation/they say you better listen to the voice of reason/but they don't give you any choice because they think that it's treason/so you had better do what you are told/you better listen to the radio
One of the most biting criticisms of corporations and conglomerates and radio ever.
And you can dance to The Clash, to Costello, to the Ramones, to the Born To Run Springsteen. So much more than to any other decade's breakthrough (although the entire reason The Strokes make music is to have people dance silly dances like The Carlton Dance).
It's kinda sad, when you think about how rock went from something fun to something dark and angsty, and the majority of mainstream rock still sounds like that.
And while we're at it, radio still sucks as hard as it ever has. Regular FM, I mean -- although for all the diversity of satellite radio, it still presents the same problem in that the playlists are always so limited and set on making a specific pattern. But FM radio has become something even more awful than ever -- I remember discovering FNX (Boston's Alternative Rock Station) one summer night (I remember it was definitely August, and I was going into my senior year), and being amazed by the music that they were playing, because it wasn't exactly the same as everything else that was being played. They also had much more interesting DJs.
Now?
They're basically the same fucking thing as CYY and other shitty New England rock stations. Going between the bands that most of the world will only recognize for one song because hey, that's all that got played during high-listener times, and playing a band that everybody knows and hates (STAIND!), because some meathead who listens to strictly rap except for the one time he spun his dial wrong and heard the shitty group gets all his buddies to request it.
Wow. What a run-on sentence. I know I sound like I'm full of too much bitter vitirol for a 19 year old, but bear with me, because I spent more time studying music and film history and production than I did anything else in high school. I have some idea what I'm talking about.
I'm looking at the Modern Rock Chart. For the first time, it's nearly full of bands that I actually LIKE. Green Day, Nine Inch Nails. Weezer, Beck, System Of A Down, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Queens Of The Stone Age. However, right out of the top 10, there's tons of bands who are not nearly as talented or original: Mudvayne, Chevelle (a band with potential, but I can't tell if they'll fulfill it), Seether, The Bravery. Then there's the bands that have rediscovered the synthesizer -- and have started writing shitty rock around it. How about we leave writing songs with synthesizers to Hot Hot Heat? And how about every retro-rock band less obviously take every single step they've made from The Strokes (think about it: the "organized garage chaos sound" re-exploded into rock after their debut, and all these bands picked up synthesizers after Nick Valensi played some oddly-tuned jazz guitar notes on Room On Fire -- which nobody's picked up on, by the way).
I can't imagine how many people I happen to be pissing off by writing this. But I imagine I can get a ton of people to agree with me on my next rant!
Modern rap is a dead life form whose carcass is being toted around as though it still is vital and breathing. It doesn't sound like anybody's even rapping originally anymore -- they're putting all their time into the backing track and not into what is going on in the verses -- this is kind of the antithesis of rap, isn't it? It's all become "hip-hop", where the beat means more than the lyrics. There's nothing as horrendously truthful as N.W.A. or as slick and well-put as early LL Cool J, and when the two most original groups today happen to be three white former punk-rockers and a group that has one whacked-out genius and a regular street hustler -- there's a problem. Five people should not have to be the ones pushing rap forward. It should be a large group of people. Ever since The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, rap became immediately stagnant. It became "money, cars, bitches" or "I'll shoot a fucker", which just so happens to be the two respective themes of B.I.G. and Shakur -- the life of money or the life of poverty, and although they both exposed and deepened these themes rather well, no one since then has tried very hard. Perhaps Jay-Z. But beyond that? Eminem? Give me a break. Eminem has been pushing the angst that Kurt Cobain brought into rock and roll ten years prior and sold it off as his own thing.
I knew rap was dead the moment I realized 50 Cent's major-label debut was missing one crucial ingredient: his sense of humor. Before being signed, 50 Cent was maybe the funniest rapper in rap; he didn't care who he offended in the business, and he'd roll loose on anybody if it worked. It made up for the lazy drawl that he calls his "flow" and that his lyrics beyond the jokes weren't all that great.
But once I made a couple listens through Get Rich or Die Trying and discovered that the only real jokes there were came in "Wanksta", which was much older than the album was, I figured out that there was no longer any hope at all for rap. When 50 Cent is forced to sell his "gangstaness" because that's what everyone else does, rap is dead. There's no new Public Enemy (because Zach De La Rocha won't finish his fucking album!), there's no rap group that really seems to use the DJ to a full effect (except for The Beastie Boys, but they were already mentioned for being one of the few people who have helped push rap forward), there's barely any real rap at all. It's all "studio gangstas" and "I got my record deal advance pimps".
I had begun to drop rap very quickly; 1997, thereabouts -- but I used to keep myself partially in that musical genre, because I was hoping there was still some brilliance there. Nowadays, a rap album doesn't really exist to me anymore, unless it's a new Outkast album.
Okay, I think this has been a long enough music rant. But I'll end it with one last little bite about the radio again, but this time from a hero of mine:
Radio is the sound of salvation/Radio is cleaning up the nation/they say you better listen to the voice of reason/but they don't give you any choice because they think that it's treason/so you had better do what you are told/you better listen to the radio
One of the most biting criticisms of corporations and conglomerates and radio ever.