Music
One of the things I do is contribute to a local media website, mainly music reviews. It’s easy, fun, and a nice way to pad my name. Personally, one of my favorite aspects is the monthly email that comes a week or so before the monthly meeting. We’re given a list, at least 30 albums, with typical A&R info and such. Since I find press release descriptions to be pretty hookey its much easier to use the bane of society, the savior of struggling musicians, Myspace.
Myspace is great for discovering new music and might be the only thing great left about the website. I remember listening to Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip’s “Thou Shalt Always Kill” when it barely had 500 listens. On the other end of it, you can see how the bloggists and the slick indie faggots like Pitchfork and Spin turned an interesting and novel hip hop track into a boring, bloated album proving that a stretched concept is nothing more than just that. And that is indeed the crutch of Myspace, it’s not too hard to make one good song, but to make an album of good songs takes more time than the catapult of the internet allows. Shame that it’s much kinder to bad musicians.
Take Heartsrevolution for example. Described by their PR as “mixing the visual ker-pow! of Japanese anime, grinding discontent of riot grrl & the intelligent disco breakdown”, there isn’t a whole lot to like, much like watching proteins break apart while your house burns down around you. You’ve got your busy 8-bit blips, moody girl with overproduced vocals and sullen attitude (and in this case, a possibly faux British accent), a “straight man” (usually a producer who’s constantly looking for his next bump, no matter the company), and some sort of thinly veiled aspect of grrl power via questionalbe sexuality. I’ve seen it all before with The Millionaires and Crystal Castles. It’s this sort of inauthentic pandering that people who know better still eat the fuck up. It’s not that there will never be shit music, that there will never be music that isn’t riding a trend, it’s the choice to at worst, to pick the lesser of two evils. Would you sleep with Billy Corgan? Then why the fuck did you buy TheFutureEmbrace?
These days, with how easy and fast it is for pop music to change, people are less likely to own their choices, and thus makes the statement that “rock is dead” ring a bit more true. What happens is that you get this music thats so left of center, so out of the flow, that its more like posturing to say “we’re different” instead of “we’re ourselves” and in the end it doesn’t matter what you have in your bag, we’re all just going to assume its shit.
