The Musical Void

The more I listen to radio and am exposed to the mainstream music of today's media I become increasingly irritated by the noise that has been allowed to slip under the radar and has become accepted as a form of art. The artists of today who have been ignorantly dubbed super-stars are nothing more than a product of over-aggressive management companies and studio technology. The talent and ingenuity of the past has been bartered for musical redundancy and a proficiency in lip syncing. We idolize mediocrity in a way that is disgusting. We encourage this assembly line style of musical production that is heard with every press of
seek >>|. I am not claiming that the world has been sapped of musical talent but the fact is that we have gone tone deaf or collectively have chosen to give the cold shoulder to legitimate music. Our taste in entertainment has become infantile, we are so caught up in bright lights and tawdry costumes that we forget to designate a portion of our attention span to the music. I recently came to this realization while I was watching an old video clip of a live Beatles performance. As I was listening to the song I was reading through some of the posts that people leave on the videos out of curiosity and I came to one that said "The Beatles look really boring in concert". To see the Beatles in concert at the height of their fame would be an unmatched experience for anyone regardless of genre preference. The concerts at the time were the "unplugged" version of the concerts we witness today. The artists were not fabricated in a studio and live performances were at the core of defining music. Today we are stuck with artists who butcher their own music (which is an impressive failure in itself) but then try their hand at classics, the product is the auditory equivalent of waterboarding. One of the most recent examples is the Black Eyed Peas ruthless slaughter of "Time of my Life" in which the band used a sample of the song as the foundation for their rendition titled "Dirty Bit". The song is not catchy outside of the chorus (which is not their music) and honestly I feel was just a desperate attempt to leech off the success of the original in hopes of gaining recognition...and sadly it worked. To further solidify our pallid taste in music, the general consensus is that Lil' Wayne is a gifted lyricist. When being deemed a gifted (or any other complimentary adjective) lyricist entails putting words together that rhyme yet have no meaning to the song or just making words up entirely {i.e. Jardins} then we need to reevaluate what we are supporting. In addition to general lack of creativity performers such as Lil' Wayne promote nothing more than drug abuse and crime. The fact that he went to prison should have been a red flag yet it boosted his popularity. When we become advocates of these people and the lifestyle they promote via their "music" the danger transcends the negative effects on the music. When people (adults and children) begin to think that the road to success, musical or not, is paved by being a thug or gangster then we are in real trouble. We need another Marvin Gaye to set the world straight or another John Lennon to show us what a real lyricist is capable of creating. We need another "Unchained Melody" covered by The Righteous Brothers that makes the original seem fleeting. We need the King to blow audiences away with his showmanship and talent deserving of his crown. We need the Beatles to bring a mania to the world, generated from originality and raw talent. What we need is to remember what music was and how we have strayed so far from the path. We can not continue to call what Justin Beiber and Lil' Wayne pollute the airways with music. If we would wake up from the hypnotic trance that has everyone enthralled by meretricious performances and meaningless lyrics the music of the world would flourish. The kids that grow up twenty years from now would not be chasing around the talentless peer that MTV has decided is the next big thing but would be surrounded by music with meaning and substance.