So this is what the music industry has come to.
A few months ago, I hopped into my younger brother's car for a ride.
"What are we listening to?" I asked.
"Just some commercial rap from two weeks ago," he replied.
My brother wasn't knocking rap in general, but rather what passes for "rap" today. And there is a difference.
Growing up in the early '90s neo-colonial suburbs, where Sega Genesis was the new "outside," we were essentially raised by Dr. Dre and Kurt Cobain. At the time, the pre-CBS-buyout-MTV was quickly developing a dichotomy of music to guide our collective stylus for the next decade: rap or rock.
Since then, hip-hop has crystallized into a self-replicating fad, competing with disco for the Intercontinental Transience Belt, and rock has become either presumptuously boring or presumptuously not non-boring, at best.
Bell-bottoms. Afros. Chest hair. Mirrored balls.
These are all artifacts, I'm told, from the last time period in which a musical genre came to be defined by the place in which it was practiced: those culturally hallowed days of disco.
In the late 1970s, mass hype and hysteria erupted over a common culture flooding from the downtown discotheques. A combination of steady, slapped bass, controlled funk, and incoming and outgoing dance moves and hairstyles all coagulated into one massive, sparkling, coke-choked monster.
Flash-forward. Baseball caps with the stickers still on. Jackets to match the pants a la Ali G. Cornrows, flare-outs and chains.
Nowadays, a new music and culture is being defined by its location: the club. Borrowing equally from infuriatingly lazy, straight sampling, and from techno's super-thick bass and synthetic treble, club music is a sad remnant of what used to be called hip-hop. Hip-hop with its soul and insightful lyrics, even its very purpose, ripped out.
"This is why I'm hot/This is why I'm hot/This is why, this is why, this is why I'm hot."
I'll bet. Hey, thanks for not saying anything of substance, I almost had to think for a second there! Also, congrats on rhyming "hot" with "hot." Mims, that must've kept you up all night.
A perfect example of how presumptuous rock music has become is the band Nickelback. These Canadian scumbags honestly think you are retarded. Don't believe me? Take the Nickelback Challenge:
For this experiment, you will need two stereos that you can cue up simultaneously, and separate copies of Nickelback's two biggest hits, "Someday" and "How You Remind Me." Start both songs at the same exact time. Now, kick back and try to maintain respect for the band.
If the songs are cued up correctly, you will find that-besides the lyrics-they are literally identical. Same tempo, same chord progression, same overall structure: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, acoustic breakdown, bridge, chorus.
Nickelback thinks you are stupid. And you know what? They're right. The band has sold millions and millions of copies of both of these songs to an oblivious public, and it probably doesn't even bother you.
If you're at all like me, though, you like your history like you like your climatologic tropical seesaw oscillation patterns: cyclical.
Fortunately, rock music seems to have a self-correcting mechanism built right in-you can almost always depend on some new band to "wash the tree." Punk cured extravagant cock rock just as surely as grunge solved the problem hair metal had become. And if you are actually into rock, you know there's a lot more going on than Nickelback and Dave anyway.
And if you're at all bored with the repetitiousness of "club," then perhaps there lies a remedy around the bend.
By the time the early '80s rolled around, disco was a joke. Still heavily appropriated in comedy, the cheap transience of the culture that surrounded disco was somehow revealed. Perhaps the ultra-controlled funk and dark undertones of new wave held up a grotesque and disfiguring mirror to disco, and the image was more than the latter could bear.
And perhaps it is time for a new new wave.
