Whatever happened to rock, the music of our youth, the pulsing
energy source of our rebellion against hypocrisy, against the dull-gray
adult world of crushing responsibility, compromises, and lies? Exhausting
its creative possibilities, utterly using up its bag of tricks, rock
degenerated into pre-teen bubblegum music, into heavy metal, hip-hop
and rap, all of it cloned and manufactured at the hi-tech consoles of
music studio assembly lines. It became the cash cow of multinational
conglomerates. It sold out and lost its vitality, its very soul. It
became mainstream, decadent, bogus. It took up residence in the realm of
big money, of glass towers and limos, of overpaid executives in oversize
corporate suites, of management hierarchies and profit centers, of nervous
stockholders, of teams of aggressive lawyers. It's no longer our
music. It's no longer really music at all. Now, it's product,
packaged and sold like cereal at the supermarket.
Trading digitized mp3 music files over the Internet is the latest threat to the profits of the music industry. Piracy? Maybe, but it's not as if we were talking about our cultural heritage. The degraded end-products of three decades of reverse evolution in rock music have no more pretension to being art than the sacks of manure at the local feed store. Manure, at least, serves a useful purpose, helping things grow. What passes for contemporary rock stunts the growth of all it touches.
Angry about the music industry shutting down Napster? Hey, they're acting totally in character, just trying to protect their market and their profits. The logical response is not to illegally copy and trade more of their product (it's not your music, you don't own it). Instead, just stop listening. Take your heavy metal, hip-hop and rap CDs and toss them in the dumpster. Use them for coasters. Treat pop music with the same contempt that the music moguls reserve for all the suckers who buy $19 CDs and $100 rock concert tickets. If 16-year-old wannabes blast rap from their car radios on the main drag of every hick town in the Rust Belt, Bible Belt, and Garter Belt, it's fool, not "kewl". It's nothing but doggerel rhyme, the sort of thing that Gilbert & Sullivan might have written had they grown up in an inner-city ghetto... and been born profoundly retarded. It's elevator music for the new millennium. It's stale bread, soggy cornflakes, day-old newspaper, rancid peanut butter, putrefying fish, elastic without the snap, cola without the fizz. Dead as disco.
So, what next? Support your local band. Pay them for listening to their music. Buy CDs directly from them, not from the megacorporations. Encourage your favorite musicians to abandon the used-up heavy metal/rap lets-pretend-it's-music-not-noise format and to experiment with 40's jazz, bebop, swing, and the big-band sound. Listen to a Bach cantata. Be blown away by Orff's Carmina Burana. Open yourself up to opera, polyphony, plainchant. Learn to play an instrument. Make some music yourself.