1 Sep
2010
1 Sep
'10
1:10 p.m.
On Mon, 30 Aug 2010, Dave Phillips wrote:
The kids bring in everything from the 60s to now. They
bring in crap
and they bring in tunes that I end up using in my own shows (I
recently appropriated Dave Grohl's Everlong). I've been listening to
pop music since the early 1950s, and it seems to me that there has
always been a constant amount of shite on the airwaves. Of course
there is, because you can easily manufacture it. You can't easily
manufacture the truly great music, IMO it's gotta come from within the
artists themselves. So there's always been a varying amount of good
stuff.
These days, I tend to find out about bands through a sort of grapevine.
There are musicians I know online, mostly in Europe. Often the stuff
they listen to is stuff I'd be interested in also. I imagine a lot of
people have gone to this mode of discovering new music -- forgetting
about the pop airwaves, relying on the grapevine. Some artists are even
becoming "pseudo-famous" this way...not famous because of the mainstream
media, but famous because they've got the referal of other current day
musicians on the Internet that are widely known to be good artists.
It'd be nice if this trend continues. The more it does, the more
superfluous the mainstream pop industry becomes.
Btw, there's a strong argument that the "teen
craze" sort of pabulum
started with Disney and his ilk. Pop stars such as Annette Funicello
and other Mouseketeers were the Britneys of the day, and manufactured
stars such as Fabian soon took over the charts after the harder rock
music suffered from the effects of Buddy Holly's death. Disney and
Colonel Tom Parker determined the tastes of whole generations of
listeners. They substituted saleability for creativity, and the rest
is what's known as pop history.
Yeah, that's happening again, Disney again. Miley Cyrus, Hannah
Montana, the Jonas Brothers, etc. Moral of the story: Mickey Mouse
makes a very poor DJ....
--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky