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.