I recently read this article and man it gave me a lot of food for thought. This guy has it nailed, music used to be about passion and about feelings, a way of expressing deep seated emotions, horrors that we saw or that we lived through. It didn’t matter who you were, you had this medium to say what you needed to say, to raise a finger to the man. Like everything else in this world rich people have to take over and monetize it.
Don’t get me wrong, the music business has always been about making money, but there was true talent coming through and rising to the top. Elvis revolutionized music, then came the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan isn’t a great singer but he’s an artist, Eminem isn’t a shiny popstar he came up rough. In fact, none of these people had polished upbringings. There is something special about someone coming from nothing with a great talent and bursting onto the scene to share their pain and ecstasy with the listening public.
An expression of anger, love, feeling, emotions that are passion fueled, not auto-tuned nonsense that we are drip fed- that’s what music used to be. I listen to current music, in fact, if you were to scroll through my music right now you would probably back away slowly. If you were to troll through my hundreds of CD’s I might get some cred back, but there isn’t much in the way of hard luck stories in music these days.
Why is that? Well, apart from the fact that the arts are being removed from public schools everywhere as funds are slashed again and again, there is that pesky problem of nepotism. It’s been permeating every other industry since the dawn of time, it might as well infest music. If your face fits you’re golden and if it doesn’t then girl, bye!
Parents are paying half a month’s salary to hook their kids up with tickets for the latest tour of the latest passing artist and then paying double that just for a meet and greet that likely involves taking pictures with a cardboard cutout, because the artist is too exhausted to be seen. For the older generation you can still go and see the stalwarts of rock but you’re going to pay a fortune to watch something that is nothing like what they sounded like in their day.
The days of letting it all hang out on stage, letting it all go in the booth don’t mean the same thing now as they did then. Now it’s a planned wardrobe malfunction, or a public relations relationship to boost fan base.
When Elvis arrived on scene he was a rebel with those snake hips, when Johnny Rotten emerged he was a livewire who didn’t give a shit about what people thought, and rock music and rap music followed and they brought a rebellion for a misunderstood youth. Now our youth are falling in line with doctored tunes produced by well-groomed robots artists, and there is no love there at all.