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Sunday 29 April 2012

Music is on its arse

Subjectivity sucks big fat meat-stench testicles. There always comes a time where there will become an objective truth so self-evident to every observer that nevertheless gets to escape ruthless punishment because it can hide behind arguments regarding taste and subjective value.

Music is appalling now. No-one's doing anything of any value. It's a great brown blancmange of auto-tuning and oh-so-tinny perfect beats, mass produced in a great sausage press.  No, it's even worse than a sausage press. At least a sausage press retains some secrets. There's no magic or mystery to music any more. We might speculate that the sausage we're eating is 90% cysts and fannies but unless you're actually privy to the factory's procedures you can't know for sure. Music now is manufactured before our very eyes.

It is ghastly, but it's not really a problem. We still have all the old music to listen to. That still retains all its own splendour and creativity. Not for nothing did the album charts suddenly fill up with 25-year old re-entries as soon as the rules were changed to make digital downloads eligible towards sales figures.

The problem, though, is that you can't replicate the shock of the new. Even someone hearing a great masterpiece of music for the first time will have to do so in a world which has already digested the innovation, absorbed it and - inevitably - commodotised the most commercially-viable elements into all manner of dreary conveyor belt pap pop.

As such, I present my five point guide to reinvigorating music into a long, long overdue renaissance of creativity, novelty and discovery.

  1. No honkies - we all know that no good can come from white people making music. All of the best popular music has come entirely out of black culture. The only white artists who are worth a damn are the ones who are completely aware of that fact and tip more than just a hat in its direction.
  2. No release - all new albums will be presented to an independent panel (yeah, me, why not). If it is worse than pre-existing records already in circulation it will be destroyed with fire and bees.
  3. Bring back Tony Wilson - he'd know what to do
  4. House bands - All the old soul music factories mass-produced pop songs for the kids, but they were brilliant and not shit. Reason: house bands. Actual bands playing the music, rather than some spotty oik in a studio putting down a bassline and then manually correcting every note on a computer, get a funky fucker with an afro, a purple velvet suit and a spliff on to lay that shit down, warts and all.
  5. Make Toots Hibbert the Education Secretary - unless he's busy, when Lee "Scratch" Perry would do very nicely as a replacement.
You're welcome.

If you would like to listen to something which is both new and good, I suggest you could listen to Richard Tingley's Variety Hour Podcast, now featuring elements of my obsessive compulsive list-making behaviour.

1 comment:

Kompani said...

I hope that out of despair a group of snotty teanagers will come up with another 'rock n role' or 'punk' or something that will be the scourge of newspapers, explode blogs, burn twitter and shake the whole music industry up. I live in hope.

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