Cyrus McNally McNally is a fourth-year
neuroscience student who spends his spare time developing computer
models of psychiatric disorders. Your opinions are welcomed:
[email protected].
The Backstreet Boys are wrapping up another mind-blowing,
heavily experimental set at a dimly lit club on the east Sunset
strip, and AJ has just bitten the entire wing off a live bat some
fan threw onstage.
Kevin and Howie are finishing the last haiku in “Space
Jazz Odyssey,” a 30-minute, free-form composition
conceptualizing the quintet’s metaphysical ideals of
salvation and states of consciousness. Nick passed out in an
onstage Adderall binge and Brian is trying to mix in cuts from the
Flavor Flav solo album.
Absent from the crowd are the teenyboppers of the 20th century,
who once pulled their hair out and screamed about what critics have
called the most successful boy band in modern history. In their
place are mostly couples of a disgruntled, bored generation who are
unimpressed with what adulthood has turned out to be.
Through the .music they seek truth, answers and a viscosity of
credence absent in the music of their parents’ generation of
the 1990s, which was doomed to formulaic lives governed by the
economy. They seek change, substance and a new way of life.
Back to reality. So, maybe no one has yet introduced the
Backstreet Boys to LSD or any other psychedelic drugs, as the
previous scenario imagines, but hey, maybe someone should! I mean,
look what Bob Dylan did for the Beatles! In 1964, the Beatles were
your average world-conquering, female-heart-dominating, all-time
record-breaking boy band. Bob Dylan handed them a joint, and by
1965 the band had started playing sitars and putting reversed vocal
“messages” in its albums.
Millions of dollars in record sales and a drug revolution later,
the Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus Christ”
(according to John Lennon anyway). So maybe the Beatles had the
upper hand on our beloved Backstreet Boys to begin with (the band
wrote and played its own songs ““ an amazing feat by
today’s standards), but our Fab Five could benefit its own
career by spending more time with Bob Dylan.
Well, the point of this column isn’t that music influenced
by drugs is good, but that boy bands and most other popular music
is bad! And let me tell you how bad it is. It’s not bad like
Michael Jackson is bad. It’s bad like Bruin defense.
Have we really advanced so far as a civilization, that Rolling
Stone ““ arguably the world’s definitive source for
current music trends ““ features a teeny-bopping sensation in
a suggestive, half-naked pose (well, I’m not really
complaining about that part) on the cover of almost every issue? At
one point, to be on the cover of Rolling Stone meant you had
skills, funk or at least creativity. Now it means you have a
terrific butt.
The fact is, most of the artists of today’s Billboard Top
50 don’t just put me to sleep, they make me mad! They make me
a bitter human being, ashamed to be an American, where Eminem is an
icon because he can spout bull faster than any other Slim Shady,
where people take Marilyn Manson seriously and where *NSYNC takes
itself seriously.
America’s current popular music reeks with unoriginality.
It is merely a festering money pit preying on the simple-mindedness
inherent in the mentality of the masses, inbred with crass
commercialist tactics and fronted with terrific derriere. While its
production might be as slick as Steve Lavin’s hair, this
music is not about creativity.
Listen up. The Man (i.e. record companies) doesn’t care
about stirring your mind or your booty. He cares about only one
thing: your money. He has devised a contraption so diabolical and
so efficient that most of you do not even realize you are being
oppressed ““ held back from experiencing fresh, innovative
music. We give seemingly benign nomenclature to this contraption:
the “boy band.”
And although the popularity of this tried and true capitalist
machine will eventually pass, as all things tend to do, I would
like to give thanks to the boy band machines and the terrific butts
on Rolling Stone pretending to be musicians, not because I
appreciate their art, but because without their dominating
popularity, there could be no “underground” music
scene, and therefore no good music whatsoever.
If the boy bands and other pop music machines had never stolen
the limelight, then minicultures centered around reactionary
genres, such as turntablism, trip-hop or emo could have never
evolved.
By keeping their manipulative hands off hybridized music too
weird for the masses, and thus not castrating creativity, big
record corporations are doing the evolution of music a favor. Even
though groundbreaking artists like DJ Shadow, Portishead and Modest
Mouse sell decently, their music remains free from big label
requirements and whims, keeping the spirit of independent music
““ and evolutionary processes in music ““ alive.
Now, dear readers, for those of you who have gotten this far,
the next time you decide to go record shopping, I challenge you to
think for yourself! Break away from mass mentality! Don’t
give in to arbitrary trends! Buy something different for a change.
Remember, as Winston Churchill once said, “To change is to
improve, to change often is to be perfect.” And, don’t
let the man keep you down!