This weekend I was watching the new Who documentary and was just overwhelmed with nostalgia and sadness. I was just overwhelmed with the enormity, the concept, the thought, the beauty, and the sheer power of the music. To think this was just one band from my youth and when compiled with The Stones, Hendrix, Genesis, Pistols, U2, Janes Addiction, Clash, Jeff Beck, The Replacements, Kinks, on and on and on. The sheer degradation of all this just brought me to such a sad place.

Last week it came out in the news that the record company EMI was bought out basically by a liquidator company. The walls of the music industry are falling very quickly and as they start to divide up the publishing, the catalogs, sell off the desks and the phones we will find ourselves in basically a black artless hole called the present and future of music. How did we end up here? What the hell went wrong? Well to start you have a business empire that was basically run like an orgy from the Roman days. Filled with lavish coked up executives, planes, rock bands, tours, sex, money, greed and power god I miss that. But above all this there was the artist/band and his music, there where men of vision who invested their money or the companies money into the Springsteins, Farrells, Townshends, Costellos of the world. If you watch the Who special it took them 5 or 6 yrs before they knew what they where doing. It took them 5 yrs to figure out who would write the bleeding songs! Today you can't do that you've got 6 or 7 months.

What went wrong is just the music caught up to society. We live in a society of immediate gratification. I want it TODAY. I don't want the next hit in 2 years, I want it today. Also let's factor into that equation not only that I don't want to even pay for it. So now we have a public that wants it music NOW and has no revenue.

IT'S FREE! It's ALSO CRAP.

Our Art has become like a McDonalds hamburger like everything else in our society we just want to consume it and throw it away. I just want the newest aural candy today free and tomorrow I will download the next hit and throw it away. We download all this crap and save it on a little iPOD that stores all my crap. One of the kids that works for me I look at his iPOD and asked him if he listens to everything on there and he responded no not really I just download and make a play list and next week I download and I make a new play list…etc.

Garbage in garbage out

Don't get me wrong I not sitting here like my father or something preaching “In my day music was music this is just noise”. I hate that attitude I hate people who sit and say in my day this was that and that was this…HEY DUDE it's NOT 1975! You haven't bought an album since Houses of the Holy. Also they don't sell vinyl anymore WAKE UP! My frustration lays in the fact of where is the NEW Zeppelin, the NEW who, the NEW Nirvana, the NEW METALICA, the NEW NWA, the NEW STP. Where is the record that changed your life like Quadrophenia did, Never Mind the Bullocks, Wired, etc. Look back there hasn't been a band or artist of substance in in what 10 yrs. Where is the new music, the new pop art, the new cultural change, the new leaders, the new guitar hero, the new instrument, the new vision, the new concept, the voice? It is the same crap year after year nothing is new its just recycled retreaded crap. I like Green Day I really do but I'm sorry it's a cross between the Ramones and the Buzzcocks 1977. The hairstyle, the clothes, the sneer, the attitude, the bar chords are 1977 which was a great year. But it's equal to me listening to music from 1947 when I was 17. I wasn't listening to Perry Como I can tell you that but kids today sure are. In the past 10 yrs you can just watch some videos of Alice Cooper change Alice to Marilyn and well you get the idea.

Maybe we need the complete destruction of the machine to create something new? I don't know we live in a time where the marketing and recording of music is so easy. Gone are the days of selling your car to make a 2 song demo you just need a laptop and some software. Gone are the days of walking around with slashed up clothes, or Snakeskin suits to get attention from record labels, or just vanning it across America playing every shithole to find that fan base and A&R guy. Just post your stuff on myspace.com and your half way there. It's all just become so easy and without great struggle come such mediocrity. And that is truly where we are mediocrity hell.

But it's FREE !

What lies ahead ? There is talk now of record labels or what is left starting to give the music away and selling banner ads for revenue on their websites. Others talk of the track will be free but there will be a tag line ”This song sponsored by Target or Burger King”

What the f&^%$^ ?

Can you IMAGINE listening to Jimi Hendrix "Are You Experienced" when you where 16 and at the end hearing "Sponsored by Pepsi". In the words of the great Nigel Tufnel “It's a Joke isn't it..a joke ?” No it isn't Nigel the joke is on us. You get what you pay for. I can only dream of music in the future that is so different and new that I don't totally understand it, that my kids embrace it and they listen to and relish till my grandkids are born. Different but with depth, enormity, substance, beauty, passion, fustration, anger, and value.

For some reason I don't think kids will be listening to Gwen, Snow Patrol, Sevenfold, and Korn in 2030 and thinking god what a classic album. Its already in a playlist from 2006 and forgotten like a Dominos pizza.

Teddy Rasch
tr@musictoyz.com