I'm done with music...

I’m done with music. I’m sick of everyone’s private little band, I hate the hipster games of “have you heard of…” I can’t take LP’s or EP’s or the ED that comes with a thousand bands who are too drunk to fuck or make decent music.

To hang around with the people I do, Patrick Wolf was the second coming. He had everything an indie kid could want, highly effeminate posturing with homoerotic overtones, circus colors and a catalogue that sounded like the Beach Boy’s Smile if Brian Wilson had been dragged through the 1984 post-punk revolution. Not only this but for whatever reason, he was the Elliot Smith every Elliot Smith fan wanted since Elliot Smith. (who I can’t stand by the way)

I’m sick of every second album being as thought through as take out Chinese. The curse of the second album used to be that bands had toured with 12 songs for so long they had forgotten how to write, or that they were one-hit wonder trying to cash in on a niche market to override their lack of talent. Now these bands hit a rough patch and they throw the apathy into overdrive. You can’t affect enough for the photo shoot. By the way the only photo shoots that don’t make people look like absolute douche bags are photos taken when people aren’t expecting photos. When you’re going over how something should sound or where the lyrics get all garbled up. You usually see them on the inner jacket of live albums. They should be everywhere. Your web site, magazine covers…everything. Posed photographs are an atrocity. The “lets all jump together” move of the pop-punk band made baby jesus cry.
I love what myspace has done for music, I think LastFM is the best thing to happen in the last 25 years in music and I’m still not sure how they’ve managed to avoid a law suit. That aside, the corporate shove is obnoxious, not because its corporate but because they delivered on their promise.

Take this story for example: Every rag and its sister web section have a page dedicated to what people leaving shows have to say about it. Not more than three years ago I read a comment from a 12 year old girl leaving a Black Eyed Peas show. She said “Some of these younger kids, they don’t know a lot of the Peas older stuff, and I think that’s just because their young. Their just new fans.” Its ok to laugh, talking about the Black Eyed Peas early works like they were any more credible than whatever constitutes their later works is a travesty. The machine that makes the saccharine treats rarely changes formula, just shape. More concise: The gummy bear doesn’t taste any different than the gummy worm. But the issue today is that that once 12 now 15 year old girl is saying the same snobby pseudo-high-minded hog wash about a band we’ve never heard of from some Garage-juke act born 16 miles outside of Duluth. You’ve never heard of them, and who’s to know if her heads up her ass or that she’s full of shit? She may be spot on, and now I have to crate dive and dig through the annals of the internet just to find out their a Melt Banana knock off that got stones one weekend and bought the back catalogue of The Fall and the Psychedelic Furs.

What we’ve done by commercializing a culture is give the once guarded jargon of credible music to the unrefined and irresponsible. People who can no longer articulate why they like something, or analyze music from across perspectives and time periods now have free range and freer access to gallivant as if they not only can, but have and had it published to boot. The new revolution is old friends. The new music investment is financially conscious. I shall forth conduct musical purchases exactly one year after its released. Not its leak, not its pre-production web downloads, its release. Not only will my investments be less rocky and furiously more sound but I will be perennially cool in that I will only always own the older stuff. Granted, one year in the Indieverse is length for enough bad news about an artists forthcoming album to make people cling to the last one. So when you get wind of Ryan Adams’s Rap album on the horizon, I’ll be experiencing Heartbreak for the first time, when Beck pulls a Bjork and records an album using only his voice, I’ll be knee deep in Midnight Vultures (great album by the way, don’t listen to any reviews on that one). And when you’re pissed because the new Dandy Warhols has left you down again, I’ll likely be listening to something else completely but I’ll still be smug in my giant vault of money.