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Why Don't They Make Good Music Anymore?; or, It's no fun being 30!

Hello again, and welcome (back, if you're among the throngs of millions that read the first article).  Today I thought we'd take a peek at music through the ages.  But, since the ages are REALLY long and would take more time to cover than I am willing to spend, we're going to narrow the focus a little bit.  So by ages, I mean the past few decades, and by music, I mean top 40s pop music. 

In Capitalism, a buck is like a vote!

  So one often hears from ones' peers (if ones' peers are like mine; all jaded products of the early to mid 90s) that music today isn't like it used to be, which is then followed by a nervous laugh at how much like our parents we've become.  We long for the music of our youth, the Nirvanas and Soundgardens and Pearl Jams and stuff that we grew up with.  Often there's even a note of pity in our voice because these kids today don't really even know what they're missing.  Our own friends kids are still too young to really appreciate those bands, and the kids that might, don't.  But I'm here to tell you; music is never good.  Kool and the Gang up there?  While it might be a catchy song, reached number fucking 1 at the opening of 1981, it's far from a soul-moving experience, and it only got worse from there. 

Again, our dollars make this number 1

This was #1 coming into 1991.  Do you remember this song?  Doesn't it conjure up images of the 90s, all those wasted days of youth spent chasing girls...through the forest...on extremely basic 8 bit video game systems?  Of course it doesn't, unless you have edict memory, which you don't, know matter how much you want people to believe you do.  No sir, this song flashed and fried through the culture with such speed that people can hardly believe it existed at all.  In fact just looking at the list of #1 hits from that year:

Will show that, if anything, good music has NEVER been in fashion, that the masses demand not what is new, but what is a reboiling of everything they're already heard.  Even "Colour Me Bad" is really just another love song, they just don't mince words about it:

Girl, you know I'm hooked on you,
And this is what I'll do... I wanna rub you down.
I wanna sex you up.
All night.
Girl You make me feel / Girl I want it / real good.
I wanna rub you down.
I wanna sex you up.

  Well, maybe that one was a little ahead of it's time, singing not about the build up to but the actual act of winning the keys to some random persons pants via song.  At any rate you can practically transpose the gist of this list onto today's top 40s, which I don't really think need to be added here, because if you have even a sliver of social awareness you've been exposed to them all and have even had a few caught in your head. 


  Why don't they make good music anymore?  Because they never did.  If it's been produced by a multinational with the intent of making it sell as many copies as possible, then it has to appeal to as many people as possible.  And, as the top 250 on IMDB has shown us, people as a group are FUCKING INSANE.  They want to feel like they're listening to/watching something completely new while at the same time something that never steps outside of pre-determined criteria.  They want to enjoy it with out getting to know it.  These paradoxes, in turn, drive marketing types even more insane as they try to find perfect balances and, most often, they simply give up and churn out something that they know can't miss:

And this leads to trends, such as the early 90s soul-boy-bands, the late 90s girl-power bands and the current stable of drunken lunatics that slobber over themselves and get applauded for it.  The process for creating a "new pop-music trend" goes like this:

1. Your last market just keeled over dead (Disco/Grunge/Group Harmony) so you flood the world with knock-offs and mutations of that until finally something catches.
2. You copy and paste everything about that success on to every single act you can
3. Profit.

And you do this until you saturate the will of the people with trend.  Once you've reached the saturation point you just go to step 1 and start the whole thing over.
To find good music, the music that made you feel the same way you did when you were a teenager (which seems to be, in the end, the whole point of this train of thought, that we really hate how we can't identify with the youth of today) you first have to accept that, when you were a teenager, you were an idiot.  Unless you were one of those kids who listening to classical music in the morning, scathing guitar-solos' in the afternoon, and the most innovative and underground hip-hop at night (and you didn't, everyone knows that) then your tastes were defined not by you but by your exposure to pop-culture.  Once you accept that you'll stop looking and find stuff to enjoy. 
I, myself, personally, just talking from my perspective, the way I see it, etc. have found that there is still good music being created, great music even.  Not great in that "timeless symphony" sort of way, but great in that "Wow, that really kicks ass" kind of way.  For example: Kurt Vile;

Or how about PJ Harvey?

Anyways, this fucking editor is really starting to piss me off (fuckin Blogger) so I'm gonna close by saying: This is simply another example of the insanity of Everyone.

IMDB 250 has ADD; or, 50,000,000 Movie Fans Can't Be Wrong

If you're like me you enjoy a really good movie or a REALLY bad movie, but don't really have much time for the stuff in between. I mean, there's always room for an action or a comedy that may not stick with you yet is an enjoyable ride, but for the most part you avoid sequel movies, superhero movies and rom-coms (a douchy, but quickly typed, abbreviation) not because of some deeper moral reason, just on the grounds that they will BORE YOU INTO A COMA!
A problem I have encountered with this view on pop-culture is that you tend to run out of new influences pretty fast. There's only so much stuff that's mind-blowing available to watch and only so much no-budget garbage you can put up with, so after awhile you're scouring the internet looking for fresh ideas on both grounds.
Eventually you'll will encounter the IMDB top 250 list.
This encounter will probably be very, very early in your search because literally ANY search on Google (and we all always use google every single time I don't care what anyone says to the contrary) with the word "movie" in it will bring up their website.

See?

Plus it's a pretty cool resource for finding out about movies and movie related information, ie. Was Edward Woodward, star of the original "The Wicker Man" "surprisingly impressed by the quality of the script" for the remake, starring Nicolas "Johnny" Cage? You bet your ass he was!

Plus anyone willing to pay a fee (?!) can vote on the quality of movies, ranking them on a scale of 1 to 10 and even provide their own critiques, and they can even plagiarize from MST3K and act as if THEY came up the with jokes about the CRAPPY movie listings there (It's so easy it can't be cheating). Since hundreds of thousands of millions of billions use this system every single day, voting up and down every single movie ever made, it should provide a pretty good resource for finding the elusive unwatched great movie, right? Wrong. Instead of functioning as a scale of merit measuring the quality of movies it serves as a perfect meter of both the wisdom of the crowd and the dementia of the mob. Its' ranking service fills no function other than filling you in on these too pieces of data.

Take, for example, the very first 10 movies on the list:

#1) Schindler's Li...what the fuck? Shawshank Redemption? I guess so...I mean, it was pretty good, great actors, a story that really moved the characters along a path and a happy ending you felt the characters earned. But the absolute favorite movie ever? Really? Ever so slightly better the fucking gOdfather? Doesn't that seem a little bit off?

You move down the list after this initial weird-out and notice that things get a little more reasonable. The first two gOdfathers, yes they're likely choices, Inception, Pulp Fiction, yes yes, you expect those to be there. Then. at number 7, just a little better of than Star Wars, but not quite on par with Heroin addicts jamming each other in the chest with needles, sits the modern day super-movie; Schindler's List. Well, at least it's above Star Wars 5.

So that's a little peak at just what we're dealing with. The next 20 are a much weirder bag:

From 11-30 we see this list jump all over the damn place, there's the ultra-post-utopian "The Dark Knight (2008)" doing just slightly better than the pre-bomb-tension of "Casablanca (1942)", which then scores the same as "Fight Club (1999)", which itself is just slightly better than "Rear Window (1954)". I mention the year because I think it helps to illustrate how schizophrenic the list is. Maybe that's the problem; having all these movies competing on the same scale doesn't really make any sense at all. Can you objectively rank a movie just in its' movieness? Is there an ultimate state of movieness which movies seek to achieve? I don't know, but if there is, it's NOT FUCKING DARK KNIGHT! That movie was cool, yeah, but I sure as fuck didn't walk away from it thinking "what a life changer! I'll never look at playboy billionaire vigilantes the same way!", or, "You know, that Joker was crazy, but he made some very fine points about the conditions of man";

"Am I crazy, or is MA-A-AN crazy, man?"

What I did walk away thinking was "That was some enjoyable eye-candy. I'm glad it didn't get TOO preachy or moral-heavy, I mean, both the stars were dressed in superhero costumes." After I watch Casablanca all I can think to myself is "Man, I don't really know why, but that's an awesome movie" and I think alot of other people feel the same way too. But I don't think they feel that way about other ones in the same grouping, say, "Toy Story 3". Not even the original. No no, the threequel. One of Hollywood's best movies, apparently. Change your life.

And here's the problem that I have with this resource, is that it suffers from the fact that it didn't exist when all these old movies were in their heyday, and thus they will never get the same representation as movies filmed after its creation. And as the list gets lower questions reguarding it's authority only get worse and worse. For example: Pans' Labyrinth is just slightly better than 2001 while Bladerunner is exactly on par with The Social Network. There's no logic to it at all. If you had a random generator make a list of 250 movies you'd be able to glean the same amount of insight into Movieness that the list provides.

The IMDB 250 is a useless ranking system that accidentally serves as a perfect metaphor for the internet. Nothing means anything, quality is dead, and in a sea of everyones' ideas nothing will make sense to everyone, or even anyone. As for a source of good movie ideas, I'm still searching and I'll let you know when I find it.

PS: I checked it out, and Jackass 3-D is rated 7.4, only 3/5's of the way to being ranked as one of IMDB's top 250 movies of all time. No lies.

Ep 1 - Measure of the Meterman

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Universe B - Ep 1 - Measure of the Meterman

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See a much larger version over at Photobucket, or I guess you could just click the image itself.

Anyways, perhaps I should back this idea up a bit with some rambling about my goal here. I really like the old silver age comic books and I want to capture the feeling that they had but modernize it a bit. I realize that this idea at it's core is far from original, but really what idea is original anymore? Universe B will be presented as a Satirical look at our shared pop-culture reality as seen through the idealism of the 1930's, the angst and paranoia of the 90's and the terror and fear of the modern age.

I guess that still doesn't explain why I'm doing this, maybe nothing really can. All that I want to accomplish is a Comic Book with the self-contained, yet highly broken reality feeling of the 60's that makes people smile once and awhile.

By the way, if anyone out there wants in on this just say so, especially artists.