Music…what happened to you? You used to be so cool

Warning – a couple of swears…

 

I love music. I’ve loved it ever since I can remember and eventually I learned to play it and also to write it. I couldn’t ever imagine going through the rest of my life without music.

That being said, I admit that I haven’t a clue as to what is happening in music today and sadly, I don’t care.

The reason? It’s because I find much of it…well, boring.

Don’t get mad – I didn’t say crappy – I said boring. I find it boring, like listening to Ben Stein give a lecture on macro economics or watching “America’s Got Talent.”

Now, that’s just me. I mean, I’ve tried to give it a chance. I’ve listened. I just don’t find any of it particularly interesting.

Well, you say, that’s because you haven’t listened to enough it. You can’t make an informed decision.

Fair enough. You’re right. Maybe I haven’t listened to enough of it. That’s because I find it as boring as a Latin church sermon and I begin to nod off after a few bars.

I know – I’m an old dinosaur who just doesn’t get it but you have to remember that when I was growing up, I was shaped and influenced by a decade of some of the most ground-breaking music ever created. The seventies was when I was first really made aware of how awesome music could be. It was quite simply a decade of inventiveness, musical ability and an insane amount of God given talent.

Think about it for a minute.

First, forget about disco and AM gold, okay? Every decade has its share of drivel. Take a good look at what was really happening. At the beginning of the decade you had the tail end of the Beatles who were quite possibly (no, definitely) the most influential and innovative band of all time. What they accomplished in the studio set the template for what was to follow. In the seventies there was good old rock and roll, art and progressive rock, heavy metal, folk rock, glam rock, reggae, punk, new wave – so many genres, too many to list. And the thing is, you really had to know your stuff. You had to know how to play. No computers back then, no drum loops, no samples.

And if you couldn’t play, then tough shit. Get lost. Put the guitar down and slowly back away from the rack. Even the punk rockers had to know how to put together rudimentary chords and progressions. I remember the first time I ever heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Once I got over that initial “what in the name of God is this?” moment, I was floored by its incredible originality. Led Zeppelin took the blues by the balls and created a whole new genre of rock and roll. Bands like Supertramp, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Yes were creating mini masterpieces that exploded with clever chord and melodic progressions which would quite often make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. To this day when the haunting piano chords come in at the end of “Crime of the Century,” I still get shivers. What prog nut doesn’t play air organ during “Carry On Wayward Son” or “Roundabout” or shred along to Eddie Van Halen during “Eruption?” I’d love to hear someone try to program a drum machine to sound like Neil Peart of Rush. If the drum machine was self aware, it would say “Fuck this shit” and unplug itself.

What happened to all the exciting songs? What happened to all the talented musicians? Why is everything boring now?

Last year, some researchers in Spain, who I assume were really friggin’ bored, decided to break down a ton of songs from the last fifty years into lyrical and musical data that could be run through a series of complex algorithms so they could analyze it.

What they found was that over that last fifty years, while music has consistently gotten louder, the chord structures and melodies have become less diverse and more homogenous.

Less diverse and more homogenous…that means “the same” and that equals boring.

How mind-numbing must this music be for scientists, who are generally acknowledged as some of the most yawn inducing stiffs on the planet, to find it dull and uninteresting.

Wow. Good job pop music – way to suck hard at being interesting and cool.

I refuse to lose hope, however. One can only hope that one day soon, the three or four individuals, who I am convinced are responsible for writing just about all this drek, will either move on or maybe just bore themselves to death.

Perhaps a musical messiah, one who can actually play an instrument and has listened to a Beatles song or two, will come forward to lead us all back into a bygone era of great, catchy songs – a sonic landscape of verses, choruses, middle eights and guitar solos, a vista of dynamics, lyrical integrity, and melodies – yes, actual melodies that have more than eight notes, six of which are the same.

It could happen…couldn’t it?

Ah screw it, where’s my Neil Finn CD?

And don’t get me started on autotune…