Digg ThisSo I was sitting here, knocking down a nice, pleasantly-chilled Great Lakes Brewery Elliot Ness Amber Ale or two…
My bride had gone to bed, and I was sitting here playing in a couple of 250 play-chip Hold ‘Em tournaments at Full Tilt (I placed fourth in one, and third in the other). I had the TV on, and eventually the live music came on.
I don’t know what show was on — nor do I care.
What I noticed was that just about every tune sounded the same: every tune had the same, jilted, rock-with-me rhythym — and just about the same melody.
Is it just me? Am I the only one hearing this?
It seems like popular music these days is dwindling down to a singular, homogenized song.
Seriously.
It’s all I ever hear these days: just about the same melody, same rhythym — same everything.
I turn on the radio in the car, and I get the same tune, too. Am I imagining this?
I think not.
WMMS (Where Music Meant Something) and WNCX (What Nobody Can eXplain) supposedly play “progressive rock,” but MMS plays heavy metal crap and NCX plays a lot of older Top-10 filler. WMVX plays 80s — supposedly — and 102 and 104 supposedly play “current contemporary hits,” but nothing with any motive or originality.
It’s all the same stuff: nothing new, nothing cutting edge; none of it is worth listening to.
And it’s nauseating. It literally makes me want to puke.
My iTunes currently has stuff like Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac, Beatles, the Allman Brothers, Béla Fleck, Billy Joel, Cream, Eric Clapton, Electric Light Orchestra, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Led Zeppelin, Police, Santana, Roxy Music, and lots more — all melodic stuff, and nothing that even represents what music execs even think might be appealing to me.
OK, so my tastes run to Classic Rock. No big deal. I also like classical and jazz: I have Pat Metheny, Spyrogyra, Crusaders, and more in there, too. Add to that every symphony by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven - and more.
Want flamenco? I have that, as well. Name it, I have it.
Most folks, if you ask them, really detest listening to the same song all day long: they want a little variation. What you get, today, is the same crap, the same songs (maybe 15 or so in all), all day long, style depending on what the station bills itself as.
And they wonder why advertising revenues are dropping; they wonder why people aren’t listening.
It’s all the same shit.
Thank God for iTunes and my iPod: its the only thing that will help me keep my sanity.
October 31st, 2006 at 11:52 pm
If you like Gabriel, then there’s a California band called Dredg you should check out. The singer sites Gabriel as one of his strongest influences. Good stuff, their concept album is amazing, dealing with sleep paralysis and one of Salvador Dali’s paintings. I can have a disc for you by Thanksgiving if you guys are stopping by.
November 1st, 2006 at 12:32 am
I’ll check them out, Mike; sounds interesting.
As far as Thanksgiving goes, I’m not sure: Laura’s mother won’t eat poultry, so we generally do a pork roast over here so that she doesn’t have to spend the day alone. We’ll see; we have a couple of invitations for this year already, and haven’t decided what to do about them. I’ll let you know.
November 4th, 2006 at 2:58 am
“What you get, today, is the same crap, the same songs (maybe 15 or so in all), all day long, style depending on what the station bills itself as.”
It’s especially amazing since–I’ll suggest–we live in a golden age of music diversity. Not only do we have more access to more music, but there’s more music and more types of music being created today than at any other time in history. I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that that doesn’t all bubble up to the mainstream level…lowest-common-denominators and make the stockholder happy mentalities and all. But, still, you’d like to think mainstream radio would have to react to that more than it has, to date.
November 26th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
I can’t agree that “every tune sounded the same.” I’ve listening music about 30 years and I never have enough. There’s a lot of fresh and new music around (especially on the Net and independent labels)
I still listen music about two hours a day (hence, in my car, when I’m driving to my job and home) and I change a set of mp3s almost every week. Believe me, there’s a lot of interesting music around but you should be open to all styles not only to classic or progressive rock or sixties rock or something else.
You should be open for all genres, you’ll see that nowadays is everything mixed up and from this recycled mixture some fresh music grows.