The Dreary Sameness of Hell, again.
I remember being 12 years old in the spring of 1974 and being absolutely jazzed about the music I was hearing on 1400 AM WCOS, Columbia (South Carolina). Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run album had been released the winter before and I was literally saving my quarters and other change to purchase it. I really liked the heavy sound of “Jet,” which was the single on the radio at the time. Every now and then, but only at night when the DJs had more freedom to spin what they wanted, you would hear the complete title track to the album. I made a point of staying up to hear it. To ears which hadn’t heard “Band on the Run” over a thousand times already across the decades to come, it was epic.
A.D. 1974, like most of the 1970s, was an embarrassment of riches for rock/pop music lovers. Even if the majority of what was released on the radio was dreck, and it was, the songs that shone above the rest, oh, how did they shine! I’ll never forget my dismay that one warm spring day in April when I realized I would probably die before hearing the greatest rock/pop tune ever. So much good stuff was out there, and it just kept coming. One day I would perish and it would be just my luck the Next Beatles would finally show up the next day to change everything all over again.
As those of us who remember the world pre-Y2K/9/11 know now, that is and never will be a problem. To my mind, 2000 was the last year it was worth listening to the radio. Hip-hop had polluted rock with vinyl scratches and rapping throughout the latter part of the 1990s (it seemed every other white alt-rock band had to have a black guy on a turntable making whoosh-a-whoosh noises on some hapless, nameless vinyl disc) and then, Lord help us, came emo. It got worse with screamo, in which you’d hear a totally random, Howard-the-Duck-ish “WAAAUUUGH!” vocalized out of nowhere in the middle of a verse. It was bad enough you could hear how scrawny and weak these paleo-soyboys were in their singing otherwise.
Radio thus became unlistenable. Soon, with the advent of streaming music services, it became irrelevant, along with the once-ubiquitous compact disc. Amusingly, the increasingly irrelevant music magazines were putting out one article after another insisting we all throw away our “guitar-based” music and listen to any one of the 10,000 names of computer-composed electronic music, e.g., trance, trancecore, drum-and-bass, jungle, etc., because humanity would never progress otherwise. (That’s not snark. They really believed 240 beats-per-minute computer noises would save us all.)
All this came to mind when this New Year’s Eve meme popped up in my Facebook Memories.
I realized that this meme was already anachronistic when I’d first re-posted it on Facebook in 2014. By then, dubstep was yesterday’s news, it's champion Skrillex and his funny haircut rapidly fading memories. Moreover, nothing has replaced it. The only music or “musicians” you hear about are hip-hop or pop “artists,” mostly female, all of the African American ones with their hair long and straight. (Whatever happened to afro pride?) They all sell themselves with a cartoonish, R. Crumb sexuality. This generally means grotesquely outsized busts and backsides, but there is one in particular whose claim to fame is she’s grossly obese. She’s sexy, too, because she and sloppy fat women everywhere (along with some pitifully desperate, sex-starved men) say she is. Even this outlier has her hair straightened.
Rock and general pop music, sadly, is deader than a small town on a Tuesday night. It’s weird to see all these wizened old acts that are plugging away. I read about how wonderful it is 80-year-old Paul McCartney is playing three-hour shows with no break. Everyone sighs in admiration while I groan that he has to do this. Being a performing act is the only way even the greatest songwriters of the last century can survive, short of selling all the rights to their songbooks, which many, including Bob Dylan, already have.
There’s nothing to do but to curate and preserve the recordings we have in our collections. If there is any bright side, well, kid, you’ll never have to worry about missing hearing the Best Song Ever. All of them have been written, performed, and recorded. For the time being, this world is Satan’s domain, and he is incapable of creating anything. It’s the very reason every TV show, every movie, is based on pre-Y2K intellectual properties, some of them going back 60 years.
It’s not laziness. Hollywood simply can no longer create anything because evil and its minions cannot create, not under threat of torture or at gunpoint. I’ve mentioned before how there will never be another culturally electrifying moment like The Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Likewise, there will never be anything that brings people together in “fandoms” like the original Star Trek. There will never be mass excitement inspiring multiple trips to the theater like the first Star Wars movie in 1977. If you’re old enough, you remember 1979 when people were talking in whispers about that super-scary space movie, Alien. Nothing like that will ever happen again. Ever. It’s ironic to consider the eerily realistic (sometimes, anyway) special effects and how everything is more sophisticated these days, yet no one has a compelling story to tell that hasn’t been told before. The post-World War II expression “the banality of evil” applies well here.
Worse, these movies and TV shows all preach the same dreary religious doctrine of White People Are Evil and Stupid Unless They’re Sexually Deviant, People of Color Are Wise and Calm and Smarter Than White People, Sexual Deviants Are Clever and Funny Because Normal Non-Deviant People Are Boring, Women Don’t Get the Respect They Deserve for Being Smarter Than Men and Saving the Day, etc., etc., ad nauseam. I’m old enough to remember when broadcast and cable TV was a happening thing and being told that watching too much of it was bad for me. Now there’s more content than ever out there available via digital streaming and people can’t get enough. Outside of the 4chan/pol/ board, no one’s telling them to give it a rest, go outside, touch grass. I see no point in wasting my breath, either.
I didn’t quit modern entertainment culture. Modern entertainment culture quit itself. It’s dead, Jim. The real kind of dead. There will be no typical resurrection of the popular character via plot twist in the next installment of the franchise.
It’s just more degraded scenery along our way to meeting the one truly resurrected Character upon His return. We need to keep our eyes straight ahead and focused on Him.
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