Music isn't what it used to be

Bands used to focus on quality. Artists would have years in between record releases, and sometimes they were only a half hour long or less. There wasn't any pressure to create albums with 15 tracks on them, supplementing the three or four marketable singles you recorded with twelve other "filler" tracks that everyone skips over with their CD player.

You only got the tracks that the artists really wanted you to hear. The ones they spent the most time on. Bands would rely on quality (rather than marketing) to make money; if you are legitimately good, people will like you, and you'll sell records.

But music isn't an art anymore. It's a business. It's an enterprise. It's an industry full of shallow people listening to shallow artists and their shallow songs.

All an artist has to do now is create some sort of "catchy phrase" (or at the very most, a few catchy phrases -- sometimes it's just a catchy word, like "air" pronounced "ayer"). Then you build a chorus based off of the phrase, and then verses based off of the chorus. Verses that you can tell were written in 20 minutes.

You need just a single popular song to sell an entire album, and just a single popular chorus to get people to like the song, which is mostly filler just to get to the part where the singer repeats "If you just realize what I just realized" a hundred times.

The radio then rams your mediocre-at-best song straight up your... ears, making sure everyone's heard it at least three times a day even if they don't listen to the radio very often at all. And suddenly BAM, you've got a gold record and you're appearing on Leno.

Teenagers will get instantly hooked on the song and buy the CD. And then a few months later when the same damn thing happens and the next popular single comes out, they'll buy that CD. It's so formulaic in structure that it's actually really ingenious. Entire albums selling for $18 all based on a couple songs that will be popular singles for six months at the most, only to repeat the process again for the next artist, continuing forever and ever.

And garbage-music now permeates the radio stations everywhere I go. I don't even like to use the term "garbage" because Garbage actually makes good music. I try to avoid even going into the lobby at work because I know the radio station that plays over the speakers is going to be playing a song that I just heard a few hours ago on the same station.

But there's nothing that can be done about it, because teenagers are skin-deep, hollow, thoughtless idiots, looking only to get their fix of the latest trashy song, ignoring the days where poetry was preferred over pimp. When songs would have build-up and rhythmic differentiation. When we weren't so concerned with keeping everything under 3:40.

Now we just get a four-beat instrument loop that repeats through the whole song and lyrics that make you bleed out your eyes from stupidity. A rapper discovers the concept of syncopation and thinks he's struck gold. The sad part is that he has.

[edition two]