Backlash: Diskontent against Komtemp(tible)orary Musik Scëëne

Doing a little cultural slumming last night with the remote control, I found myself watching MuchMusic, and witnessed an interesting phenomenon: They have wakened to the fact that the music they feature is shit.

I watched a show called Video on Trial in which a panel of mostly stand-up comedians no one has ever heard of before are shown a selection of popular videoes, and who proceed to beat the hell out of these videoes in much the same fashion as my friends and I would. Their comments were quite funny, sometimes insightful, and always negative. The songs and "artists" featured, for the most part, were pretty weak -- except for The Killers, whom I happen to like. But the videos featured were uniformly reprehensible. If one ever needed a measuring stick by which to mark the superficiality of contemporary music -- how utterly lacking of ideas it is -- one need only watch music videos. This lost, abused, misguided artform is an atrocity.

The Backstreet Knobs were among those skewered (actually, on more than one program). Britney, of course, along with Lindsay, and the redundant Velvet Revolver took a worthy drubbing, as well.

Then came Ed the Sock's annual Fromage countdown. Again the triviality of contemporary music was the target, and Ed the Sock's remarks were cutting and bang-on as ever.

Then there was some retarded segment about "famous fallouts" of 2005. As a side note: this was among the weakest programming I've ever witnessed in over thirty years of television viewing. The hosts were tirelessly boring and unfunny, their banter lame and contrived, and the general premise of the show more than a little dubious. I know this describes most television programming, but take the worst show you've seen, multiply it by ten and there you've got what I saw last night. However, once again contemporary performers (they're not musicians, they're not singers, they're not songwriters) were taken to task as the banal succubi they are.

There is definitely a backlash afoot. Certainly, nothing about contemporary music will change. There will continue to be this glut of shit, speckled with a few rare gems. Because the people who enjoy contemporary music are not interested in quality, they only care about chronology -- when a song was released. So long as that banal piece of shit song was released more recently than anything else, it will sell. The same ridiculous non-philosophy ruled the day when I worked at a video store while going through school. People never cared about what movies were good, all they cared about was what movies were newest.

Play Beethoven or The Who: Live at Leeds for one of these shallow bobbleheads and I guess their physiology would explode. So, to the leprous pablum they flock. They can have it.