The lyric in the title today used to be my favorite line from one of my favorite songs. Now it is cringe worthy and makes me want to break something ... namely my phone. You see I own one ringtone. It is this part of the chorus of "All These Things That I Have Done" by The Killers. When my phone rings it never "rings" or plays music, it is on vibrate only or silent. This song however is my alarm. Hence my loathing of this line when I hear it creeping through my phone's speakers.
Which leads me to today's point. The radio is completely terrible for finding good, new music. It is a backwards system where what gets played on the radio becomes popular instead of music that is popular getting played. They don't do "pay for play" anymore, but they might as well. It is rare to find an independent radio station and as they get bought up it ends up very few large corporations own most everything. They then play their hot new artists on the radios.
So the radio is filled with stupid fluff meant to keep the most number of people listening from saying "this is horrible, I am turning it off." What we are left with are "singers" who are more famous for their looks or actions than musical ability giving us songs consisting of bland lyrics, "hooks", catchy choruses, and beats.
The music of our radio generation is as processed as our foods. Take young hot artist. Get catchy beat or hook. Come up with a one or two line chorus that matches the hook. Fill in the rest with random anything as long as you get back to the chorus fast enough. It leaves you with the most asinine top 40 lists ever assembled.
There is a reason Girl Talk is amazing. He takes all the great beats and choruses that everyone gets pounded into their heads by the radio, hooks them up one by one and finds the one stanza from a song that matched their frequencies. He usually uses more iconic artists from days gone by for his extended lyrics. This works amazingly well because the music of the radio is one thing: catchy. The beats are catchy, the choruses are catchy. They are meant to stick in your head.
John Lennon once said "I never listen to the radio. If it's bad, I make
fun of it, and if it's good, I get jealous that I didn't think of it." Or at least that is a quote I remember him saying that I looked up online. The fact is, the only thing he would be jealous of these days is a beat or two and maybe a catchy line in a chorus. So don't listen to the radio. Find music yourself, you don't need to be told what you like. Even if there is a good song on the radio, it gets played to death and you get sick of hearing the song. Just like my alarm.
Monday, November 24, 2008
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