The Brit Awards is the time when the best and the brightest of British music get recognition for their efforts and after watching what was served up during the week, British music is in a bad place.
Not so much the performers, i'm sure Adele and Ed Sheeran are perfectly nice people, it's just their type of music is so safe and boring. Annoyingly for people like me who like their musicians loud and their music louder, the new wave of ballad warbling artists have elbowed anyone with a noisy guitar to the sidelines.
Gone are the days when bad behaviour and band rivalries held sway, today's musicians are all about being in bed by 10 and respecting each other as artists. All very commendable but very, very boring. There have always been nice, polite groups but they seemed to sit alongside the more enthusiastic members of the music industry.
While punk puked its way through the 70's, Abba and The Carpenters catered for the less vomit friendly listeners and in the 80s and 90s bands like Guns n Roses and Nirvana rubbed along with the likes of the much more amiable Roxette and REM. Today it seems that the nice musicians and their pleasant elevator music have taken over but it seems harsh to blame them because they would still be there with their power anthems regardless of who else was around, they just might not be quite so front and centre.
Most of the blame must go to the music companies who obviously worked out that it is much easier to manage an Ed Sheeran than it would be an Axl Rose who was just as likely to turn up late and drunk as he was to give a decent performance.
One chink of light in an otherwise magnolia, bland music landscape is that music is cyclical and we have these uninteresting gaps between the good stuff.
For me the late fifties, the late seventies and then the late 80s and early 90s stand out like sore thumbs in terms of quality, passion and originality so we must be due another period after this boring stage. Please.
5 comments:
There's passion, originality, and edginess to be found out there...just not from the majors.
Of course, that makes it somewhat tougher to find.
lucy,
what you seek should be one categroy, not the whole freaking music scene.
q
I couldn't be happier with the music scene at the moment, and it's mainly due to technology & the internet.
There is all the great music that has ever been made, now widely available to download and enjoy at our leisure. Often for free. I'm discovering great new stuff all the time, but also loads of oldies that I missed first time around...
And in terms of production, modern software is making it much easier for artists to convert the sounds in their heads into music too.
The Brits is crap for sure, but then, it always was... even though it's generally normally worth watching for the presenting/continuity stuff-ups.
The majors dominate things which is why we get people like Adele and Ed Sheeran clogging up the charts and the radio with their very nice, but very boring music.
q, i don't mind a mix of music and i guess if guitar bands were everywhere somebody else would be moaning about that. I just think the music scene is a bit flat at the moment because there is not that mix because of the reason i gave to Kvatch above.
Cheezy, all the music on the internet is great, i can download songs that i wouldn't dream of paying £2.99 for. My biggest moan is when i am not in charge of what i listen to, it just seems to be ballads or Simon Cowell's singers. It's like the Stock/Aitken/Waterman era back in the 80s all over again.
I haven't listened to commercial radio (apart from particular shows like John Peel's or Pete Tong's) for many years. I honestly think that the people who do listen to these stations, are people who want to be told what to listen to (and thus aren't particularly serious music fans, if you know what I mean. On the other hand, if you don't mind making up your own mind about music then there's a universe of stuff out there, on tap, 24-7, with no charge.
PS: I do basically take your point about there not being many half-decent new guitar bands around right now, but these things go in waves. Think of it as a good chance to catch up on the good stuff you missed the first time around.
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