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timepiececlockThe following is a post I've been thinking about for almost all week, trying to figure out how to describe.
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I've been highly unsatified with radio music as of late.
It all feels like...pop.
Now, I like pop. I listen to pop. Like, Coldplay. That's good pop music. Matchbox 20. But now even the rock bands sound like pop music.... or the definition of pop music has changed so as to include balad-like rock songs that have relatively politically correct content and easy-to-hum chords.
This isn't going to be easy to explain. But lately I've been listening carefully to my local rock radio station (104.9FM), and analyzing stuff when they play alternative music of 5 or more years ago, and the music of the last 5 or so years. There's an incredible difference.
Mostly, everything sounds the same.
The popular songs of Nickelback, Three Doors Down, Default, Incubus, Lifehouse, Goo Goo Dolls. All rock bands, right? And they all have songs that I've loved, at some point. And yet, they all sound the same. Some more (Three Doors Down), some less (Incubus), but there's this level of similarity in the songs they have that get played on the radio.
And that's not even touching on the new high school punk music. Good Charlotte? Go the fuck away-- "Girls and Boys" is a *pop* song. My mother liked that song. You are a pop band. So is A Simple Plan. Posers.
A recent trend is with bands like Trapt, or Staind, AFI, Creed...or something. I'm blanking out on particular names. But the music goes one of two ways: there is a melodic verse, and then a loud and incomprehensible chorus... OR.... there is a loud and incomprehensible verse, but a melodic and easy-to-sing chorus. Thought of an example: "Sweetness" by Jimmy Eat World.
There's little variation within a song. Little experimentation within, little changes. I was listening to Nirvana on the radio the other day, and I was shocked by how much different *stuff* they did within a song. The same with The Smashing Pumpkins. Pearl Jam. There wasn't (mostly) this loud-yet-easy-to-follow routineness in most popular rock songs these days.
And their subject matter is so... tame! Where's the subversiveness? That's what I really miss about Alternative. How come the radio isn't playing new songs that are more like "Rape Me" or "Jeremy" or "1979" or "Suicide Dream"? Where's the cool but weird yet instensely romantic stuff that Live used to put out? You know... "All Over You" and so on. Nine Inch Nails. I remember about 2 years ago being delighted with the lyrical explicitness of "Control" by Puddle of Mudd... that's damn mild compared to the imagery of the "Greedy Fly" video by Bush, or so many others. Stone Temple Pilots, with lines like "The dogs begin to smell her..." ...I don't even know what that means, but it's way more weird and twisted than whatever new Staind song it was that I heard on the radio this morning. And Creed. Gag me.
I was listening "Rooster" by Alice in Chains while driving about three days ago, and I relished it. That was a relatively slow song. And yet, it's got so much *to* it. Like "Plush" or "Yellow Leadbetter." Like "Ana Song" from Silverchair. It's not the same the whole way through. You can have a song that isn't constant crashing, and yet have it be plenty loud, and weird, and subversive, and dark, and *not* a romantic ballad. Although "Yellow LeadBetter" might be romantic-- I can never understand what he's saying, so I don't know. I just love the vocals and the guitar in that song.
Now, some bands are doing now exactly what they used to do then: Red Hot Chili Peppers; Beastie Boys, 311, Cake, Garbage, etc. That's cool. Keep doing that, you have all my love. They're not quite Alternative (except maybe Garbage, I'm not sure...), but they were there during it or near the end of it, and they stood out then and they stand out now.
There's also this other new trend: bands like The Strokes. Where the whole thing, especially the voice, is so synthesized that I don't even want to listen to it.
To think I used to hate rap-rock. God, I still hate most of it, but at least it doesn't... at least the ones that I hear aren't this tame.
I find myself really liking the White Stripes. Not because it sounds like Alternative-- it doesn't at all. But it doesn't sound like anything else I'm hearing on the radio either, so that's something. And I like Seether, which is kind of Alternative. In fact, Seether has failed to do anything yet to annoy me at all, or bore me. But then I've only heard two songs, one of which _was_ subversive enough to meet my tastes.
Does any of this rambling make sense? Does anyone get the feeling that I keep getting... that something is lacking that makes it all sound the same?
I was pretty young when Alternative was popular. It hit when I was in early elementry school, and lasted up until about the end of middle school. What I hear on the radio newly written right now is *not* Alternative-- at least, very little of it is.
In a drive from Yosemite to the Bay Area in the summer after 9th grade, I sat in the farthest back of the van, on the backward seat, and stared out at the receding road and listened to the song "Galapagos" by The Smashing Pumpkins for three hours and about 40 minutes, straight. I'm not kidding. I even changed batteries once in between, and went back to the same song.
I can't think of any new song on the rock stations radio these days that I'd do that with. And there's something wrong with that.
How is it that I'm 19 and I'm talking like an old fuddy duddy mourning their lost music age?
You know a song I ahven't heard in years? "So Help Me Jesus" by the Toadies. OR whatever that song was called. You know...."Take a walk with me, beside the lake tonight..."
------------------------------------------------
I've been highly unsatified with radio music as of late.
It all feels like...pop.
Now, I like pop. I listen to pop. Like, Coldplay. That's good pop music. Matchbox 20. But now even the rock bands sound like pop music.... or the definition of pop music has changed so as to include balad-like rock songs that have relatively politically correct content and easy-to-hum chords.
This isn't going to be easy to explain. But lately I've been listening carefully to my local rock radio station (104.9FM), and analyzing stuff when they play alternative music of 5 or more years ago, and the music of the last 5 or so years. There's an incredible difference.
Mostly, everything sounds the same.
The popular songs of Nickelback, Three Doors Down, Default, Incubus, Lifehouse, Goo Goo Dolls. All rock bands, right? And they all have songs that I've loved, at some point. And yet, they all sound the same. Some more (Three Doors Down), some less (Incubus), but there's this level of similarity in the songs they have that get played on the radio.
And that's not even touching on the new high school punk music. Good Charlotte? Go the fuck away-- "Girls and Boys" is a *pop* song. My mother liked that song. You are a pop band. So is A Simple Plan. Posers.
A recent trend is with bands like Trapt, or Staind, AFI, Creed...or something. I'm blanking out on particular names. But the music goes one of two ways: there is a melodic verse, and then a loud and incomprehensible chorus... OR.... there is a loud and incomprehensible verse, but a melodic and easy-to-sing chorus. Thought of an example: "Sweetness" by Jimmy Eat World.
There's little variation within a song. Little experimentation within, little changes. I was listening to Nirvana on the radio the other day, and I was shocked by how much different *stuff* they did within a song. The same with The Smashing Pumpkins. Pearl Jam. There wasn't (mostly) this loud-yet-easy-to-follow routineness in most popular rock songs these days.
And their subject matter is so... tame! Where's the subversiveness? That's what I really miss about Alternative. How come the radio isn't playing new songs that are more like "Rape Me" or "Jeremy" or "1979" or "Suicide Dream"? Where's the cool but weird yet instensely romantic stuff that Live used to put out? You know... "All Over You" and so on. Nine Inch Nails. I remember about 2 years ago being delighted with the lyrical explicitness of "Control" by Puddle of Mudd... that's damn mild compared to the imagery of the "Greedy Fly" video by Bush, or so many others. Stone Temple Pilots, with lines like "The dogs begin to smell her..." ...I don't even know what that means, but it's way more weird and twisted than whatever new Staind song it was that I heard on the radio this morning. And Creed. Gag me.
I was listening "Rooster" by Alice in Chains while driving about three days ago, and I relished it. That was a relatively slow song. And yet, it's got so much *to* it. Like "Plush" or "Yellow Leadbetter." Like "Ana Song" from Silverchair. It's not the same the whole way through. You can have a song that isn't constant crashing, and yet have it be plenty loud, and weird, and subversive, and dark, and *not* a romantic ballad. Although "Yellow LeadBetter" might be romantic-- I can never understand what he's saying, so I don't know. I just love the vocals and the guitar in that song.
Now, some bands are doing now exactly what they used to do then: Red Hot Chili Peppers; Beastie Boys, 311, Cake, Garbage, etc. That's cool. Keep doing that, you have all my love. They're not quite Alternative (except maybe Garbage, I'm not sure...), but they were there during it or near the end of it, and they stood out then and they stand out now.
There's also this other new trend: bands like The Strokes. Where the whole thing, especially the voice, is so synthesized that I don't even want to listen to it.
To think I used to hate rap-rock. God, I still hate most of it, but at least it doesn't... at least the ones that I hear aren't this tame.
I find myself really liking the White Stripes. Not because it sounds like Alternative-- it doesn't at all. But it doesn't sound like anything else I'm hearing on the radio either, so that's something. And I like Seether, which is kind of Alternative. In fact, Seether has failed to do anything yet to annoy me at all, or bore me. But then I've only heard two songs, one of which _was_ subversive enough to meet my tastes.
Does any of this rambling make sense? Does anyone get the feeling that I keep getting... that something is lacking that makes it all sound the same?
I was pretty young when Alternative was popular. It hit when I was in early elementry school, and lasted up until about the end of middle school. What I hear on the radio newly written right now is *not* Alternative-- at least, very little of it is.
In a drive from Yosemite to the Bay Area in the summer after 9th grade, I sat in the farthest back of the van, on the backward seat, and stared out at the receding road and listened to the song "Galapagos" by The Smashing Pumpkins for three hours and about 40 minutes, straight. I'm not kidding. I even changed batteries once in between, and went back to the same song.
I can't think of any new song on the rock stations radio these days that I'd do that with. And there's something wrong with that.
How is it that I'm 19 and I'm talking like an old fuddy duddy mourning their lost music age?
You know a song I ahven't heard in years? "So Help Me Jesus" by the Toadies. OR whatever that song was called. You know...."Take a walk with me, beside the lake tonight..."
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-23 10:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-23 11:29 am (UTC)It isn't so much that it became mainstream - it was that it became the status quo - the new sound and it wasn't special or exciting anymore. I hated Silverchair and don't even get me started on Bush - hee - because this was music that meant to much to me, and it was slowly becoming nothing special at all.
I am all kinds of ssad about Sublime - they were different from what was on the radio normally and I think they would have shaken things up. Instead, we get Sugar Ray.
I'm not knocking pop music. I happen to enjoy it in small doses. I'm saying that I learned (come to think of it - this is insight from where I was 19, so yay for the 19 year old obsessed with music) that there are really no worse things than something you really like becoming popular - because that fatigue you get from the rip-off bands? Lends itself to the original as well.
But none of this is new and has been going on a lot longer than Eddie Vedder calling Scott Weiland a fucking blue-haired poseur in Spin magazine. The bands that are truly incredible change and grow with time - you can't mock their style because their style is ever-changing. Top of my head? The Beatles. Other groups find their style and get comfortable (ACDC, Aerosmith) and settle in. I find that so incredibly boring that I would chew off my right arm to escape having to see one of these bands live.
And dude - you were 13!! You are allowed to like/love/live mainstream at 13! Hell, I was obsessed with George Michael when I was 13. I loved the little grunge babies - I thought they were adorable and cute (and I was totally Miss Flannel, until I became miss Baby Doll Dress in combat boots. I still like that look).
But your post struck a chord in me - I remember realizing that everything was the same and my music was no longer exciting me. I recommend you get out there and shake things up. Maybe a music pimp post? What are the top 10 CD's you must own? (And I still think you are going to wake up one day realizing you love Johnny Cash. I just *know* it ).