Glory Days

I don't like to listen to the radio. I won't pretend that my opinion of contemporary music is objective, but it certainly seems to me that music used to be better. It used to have more life, it used to be more thoughtful, it used to be art - even the radio stuff, which was generally approved for mass-consumption on the basis of its simplicity and ease of digestion. Everyone says this at some point, and I'm only now beginning to realize that. My car does not have a CD player, and I am often forced to listen to the radio when I have run out of songs to sing to myself. There is a "Gen X" station in my area, and I'm drawn to that quite often. It's surprising to see just how well I fit into that marketing bracket. I'm also frequently surprised by how many songs are now considered oldies.

I see myself aging. Why isn't my taste in music evolving anymore? Why am I stuck in the past? I used to ask that of my father when he would listen to Bread or J. Geils, and now I ask it of myself when I'm turning up Nine Inch Nails. Maybe it's because my formative years are over, but I still cling to the soundtrack of those years. On a long enough timeline, I suppose we all give in to nostalgia.

And this brings me to my point. What are the children of today going to look back on? Bieber? The whipping back and forth of hair? The monstrous (and pretty much inexplicable) fame of Lady Gaga? I can look back very far, even past my time. I can look back on Queen and Zep, Jeff Beck and Elton John, Phil Collins, Genesis, Wings, The Beatles, Annie Lennox. So many timeless acts, music that is still influential after thirty years or more. Will the youth of today look back at the same things? What is the musical legacy of the last decade? The 90s had a strong musical identity. So did the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But I don't see that in the music of the Oughts. I don't see the flair, the style, the originality. I find a hard time believing that anyone will some day claim to have been influenced by Miley Cyrus in the same way that so many have been influenced by Chuck Berry. Contemporary radio music seems disposable. It's immediate, dated almost as soon as it hits the airwaves, a photograph of a moment and a place that no one will identify with in 10 years, much less 20. Little of it will stand the test of time the way Queen, Black Sabbath, orNirvana have. This past decade has been a festival of youth worship, and youth and beauty do not last. No, it is the truly great artists that we remember - they who not only defined their generations but whose music was less an appeal to the empty-headed masses who want only a backing track for the meaningless circus of their wasteful lives than it was often a portrait of the human condition as it could be, or as it could not possibly be, and that is what we remember.
We do not remember the elevator music. We remember songs that capture our feelings honestly. In 30 more years, people will still be listening to Born to Run. But will we look back on the last decade of top 40 hits as fondly? What will shape the music to come?

To quote Bertrand Russel: "...in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." I have lived this to a fault - and quite unintentionally. I have believed that anything with mass appeal must be of lesser value, because the only way to engineer a work of art so that it appeals to the masses is to remove all intelligence and uniqueness from it. But, clearly, this is not always true. Ghostbusters did phenomenally well in theaters, and rightly so. Queen is remembered for being an incredibly versatile and consistent band, and they deserve their place in the Hall of Fame. But I see my prejudice gaining more and more support as years wear on. Will we some day look back on 2000-2010 and point to musical acts that defined that decade? I expect us, instead, to look past that pop radio wasteland to the eternally fertile ground of the days when we all expected music to really mean something.