It seems that the radio is dying. Over the years radio stations have decreased in number and the only ones left seem to play the same songs redundantly every day whilst going to commercial at the same time in case you wanted to hear the song you just heard play again in another outlet. Different forms of listening to music are also being left behind. Like the lack of cassette or CD players in modern cars making you haul all your old Steve Winwood CD's and DEVO cassettes in a box and sell them for ten cents. In the age of aux cords and internet radios like Pandora or apps like Spotify where you can pay to play whatever you want without having to listen to commercials or being forced to listen to songs you don't want to hear just until you can hear the one that you do there's something else that's yipping at my heels and that is popular mainstream music. It seems that for the past few decades, with the surprising appraisal of disco that gave way into pop music in the 80's and that hasn't left since, we've grown up to like what's most readily available and that usually means whatever has the biggest production. Whoever paid millions to make their record sell in excess and giving little thought to the actual meaning of the album but more about what gives the general audience what they want in turn for bigger profit. Whatever is advertised more will ultimately be what the masses will be tuning into. This has been true for a long time.
Before the internet, you were only exposed to what was selling in your local record stores or wherever you went to for the latest trends. Whether it be from word of mouth, local bars or venues that featured artists and bands you went to see, or through the radio itself. What we now call the British Invasion didn't happen in America until the Beatles played on television and then everyone was listening to it.
Even as I was growing up in the times of cable TV where channels like VH1 and MTV had music videos playing every morning. I distinctly remember waking up at 7 in the morning in order to watch music videos from the likes of Green Day and Kelly Clarkson and whoever else had released a song that week.
Now I don't mean to say that there is a type of music that is superior to another. In fact, I don't think there is a bad genre of music or that more underground bands and artists have a more intellectual and wholesome contribution to our experiences when it comes to listening to music but I do argue that there is an imbalance in substance and depth. You can create a song in a luxurious studio offering you the best in technology both for sound quality and auto-tuning and that doesn't guarantee that it will have something to say much less be considered a masterpiece. It's a thin tightrope, really.
On one hand you want your music to be catchy, to be easily digestible. Something that doesn't makes you want to turn it off because it's too boring or too wordy. You can write entire lyrics about the struggles of the working class or the way you saw your friend commit suicide at age ten but if it's not interesting to listen to, if it's not created in a way that will be agreeable to your audience's ears you'll lose them. Of course, there are those artists that thrive in that. Regardless of their popularity, avant-garde music is a genre that comes to mind. Where the singer sometimes doesn't even do singing at all but instead regales in the atmosphere. Like listening to poetry, listening to an audiobook, or water boil, it oddly works for them. Algebra Suicide is reminiscent of this.
The song can be about a janitor and interchangeably changing the word for genitals throughout the chorus. I'm looking at you Suburban Lawns.
Perhaps even music that is unconventional finds itself saved by the performances of those artists when playing those songs live. This is the part where I incorporate the music video for The Plasmatics because in my opinion something that really augments a simple song is in the way it's shown. In this video, the ensemble of the band's clothing to the way they are acutely aware of entertaining is all too revealing of what can elevate a song whose only words basically only constitute of "oh no. oh yeah." repeatedly.
Why did people like Bob Dylan's music so much and still continue to consider him one of the best vocalist/musician to this day if his voice is not typically beautiful? A voice that many thought to be out of tune and sonically dense? A lot of people thought it was because his messages were strong enough to make up for the other parts, others thought that protest songs didn't have to have to be perfect in order to be understood, and others further thought that the beauty was in the fact that it did not sound like anything that would normally be considered pleasing to the ears.
Same thing applies to vocalists that don't have the best voices but still managed to achieve great success such as Kurt Cobain in Nirvana.
Furthermore, you don't even have to have lyrics or a singer in order to create a connection between you and your listener. Classical music, but more recently a genre that became popular by chopping up sounds of elevator musak along with old 80's synths was Vaporwave but weren't the first to pull off this method with as genres such as trip-hop also adapting this style of combination of sounds to create something else entirely way before.
My point being that music doesn't have to be something extraordinarily heart-felt and profound in order for it to be considered transcendental but it's easy to pinpoint when something is made as a mediocre and sloppy way to create profit and revenue. Art for the sake of creating art is not innovative and it won't stand the measure of time.
some honorable and obscure mentions before leaving:
Shigeo Sekito
Haruomi Hosono
MOONDOG
Syd Barrett
Sibylle Baier
As always thank you for reading
sincerely,
your opinionated narrator
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