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I made a trip to England in the late 1980s. Stopping in at a CD store (remember those?) I found that there was no sense of coherence in what was being offered. Bands were all over the place. The names were amalgams of strange words strung together without apparent meaning. It seemed the rock scene had been blown into a million pieces and a thousand unknown bands jumped up to fill the void. The communal act of a entire nation tuning in to one sound made by one group seemed to be over, or even the idea of having any shared, common bond. If everyone has their favorite band, how do you share the experience?
It seems to me that is what happened here over the last twenty years. There are too many bands, too many strange names and no meaning. Nothing is taken as really great and something new because very little is either one. Bands are being constantly promoted and constantly fading away at an ever more rapid pace.
The names of bands have gotten too strange, too numerous and too forgettable. That is either a symptom of the problem or part of the problem itself. (I think it is the latter.) I expect a band to be called Green Puke any day now. To be cool, the name must be weird.
What happened in the last ten years or so is that music executives lost their faith in their ability to find what works, what can be a hit or at least half a hit. The result is the idea of "just throw it out there" and see what happens. As creepy as the old system was, it at least provided some organization, some sense of what was good and what was not. Whatever guidance bands are getting now is not working. Something, probably everything, about how bands start, develop, practice and prove themselves has to be changed or it will keep getting worse.
Inside the big music businesses of years ago, there was always a sense of estrangement from most of the executives and the music they were selling. Music was always coming up from younger guys with talent, while the executives slowly aged and came to understand that they had no talent, other than making deals and supplying cocaine for parties. There were exceptions, people who picked future stars based on their own innate sense of what was good and what wasn’t, but those were relatively rare exceptions.
Sometime in the last couple of decades, music companies decided that developing rock “acts” was no longer in their best interest. They would pick bands, back them in cutting an album and try to make certain there were at least one or two potential hits on the album and that was it. The rest was left up to chance and the marketplace. It turned out not to be a good bargain. The music industry engaged in a long process of self sabotage.
When iTunes came along, it was no longer necessary to pay 15 dollars or more just to hear those one or two tracks and find out of the rest of the album was worthwhile. All of the sudden, the whole house of cards came crashing down. CD sales went down and kept on falling.
It is still possible to “hit it big” in the business of rock n’roll, but big isn’t half of what it used to be. Bands come along, they last for a season or two and are gone. To top it off, the support system of radio and MTV is largely gone, too, although pop journalism takes up some of the slack. Along with the loss of major hit groups, there is a uniformity imposed on what a rock song is supposed to be that wasn’t present in rock’s heyday. Experimentation is not welcomed, cranking out something that works is in. So, it is not surprising that the audience, and writers for the NY Times, find the whole scene less than inspiring.
Doug Terry, 12.29.11
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