The Plague of Musical Mediocrity

01.24.06

What follows is the result of a non-alcoholic evening at home spent writing music reviews......

They say one perk of working in the music industry is free CDs, but what they forget to add is that 99% of them are neither mind-blowing nor truly awful, but just stuck in musical purgatory aka mediocrity, a problem far more insidious than we'd like to believe. Why? Because mediocrity can fool you—it can fake it, put up a front for awhile, act like it's a great pop record when its foundation is baseless, hollow, devoid of any heart and soul. The old music tricks have been well perfected by nearly everyone currently playing in a band, so for most it's easy to dream up a few seemingly well-written pop songs to fool everyone into believing it's the real thing. And by the time the fakes are exposed, no one even cares. They've moved onto to the next mediocre catch of the week.
Accepting mediocrity is accepting the dumbing down of music to the lowest common denominator. If most current music averages at about a C, then a B- record is going to be heralded as a friggin' masterpiece just because it's not a C! The grading curve should NEVER be applied to art. It encourages laziness and unoriginality, which is exactly what plagues music today.
Knowing music's potential- those Brill Building songwriters, the Beatles, the girl groups, ABBA, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones (and I HATE the Rolling Stones!, which is good thing because at least they give me something to react to, unlike most artists today), the Bee Gees, and even more recent favorites like My Bloody Valentine, the Cardigans, the Pixies—I just don't have the means to accept anything that doesn't strive to be up there with the greats. Everyone should strive for greatness, because that's the only way one will ever come close to achieving it. Striving to be great and just ripping off the greats are two different things. My advice to those groups who are so uninspired as to rip off the Beatles or the Beach Boys or whoever so blatantly (and without adding anything new to the musical equation) is to stop. There are WAAAY too many of you, and it's getting mighty crowded.
It might seem unfair to hold every new band up against Lennon and McCartney, but I think at this point—with the music industry so over-saturated with mediocre bands—we need to do just that. We need to re-marginalize music! Give it back to the fringe of society. Take it away from the mainstream, where picking up a guitar has become as acceptable as playing football.

Damn the punk movement for declaring that anyone can play music! What an outrageously false statement!!!!

I await the day music journalists, fed up with having to write a 400-word review of an album that just requires two words: THIS SUCKS, will revolt against this mediocrity, and fill the back pages of music mags with 1 star and 0 star reviews, so that we can eradicate this musical plague. Music is just too special to be wasted on non-talents, fakes. We need to make space for the masters—the one's whose words and music add real value to our lives. We need to give them room to step forward and be recognized because in this enormous pool of mediocrity, even they are drowning, and that's a loss for us all.

Goodnight.

Sheila

Posted by Sheila at 12:45 AM