Headline, August12, 2013

'''THE DEATH OF TERRIBLE MUSIC'''

There's a song on the Kaiser Chiefs album called ''Everything is Average Nowadays''. More waspish critics might suggest that smacks a little of the pot calling the kettle, but I think they have a point, at least as far as rock and pop music is concerned. On more than one occasion in the last year, I've found myself thinking exactly the same thing: everything does seem average nowadays.

At first, one music lover worried that it had something to do with a general decline in standards or, worse -ones age: perhaps you can't afford to have the same enthusiasm for music at 35 as you did at 18. But then I played my favorite albums of last year next to the albums I've loved for decades and they sound great. Arctic Monkeys debut as confident and exciting as Definitely Maybe, Black Holes and Revelations by by Muse as bombastic and grandiose and mad as anything I could find from the Seventies or Eighties, Joanna Newsom's Ys every bit as strange and serpentine as Patti Smith's Horses or Van Morrison's Astral Weeks.

So the problem is not that there's no good music anymore. Quite the opposite : the problem is that there's no bad music. And without bad music to compare it to, it's hard to appreciate good music properly. A meltingly tender filet mignon wouldn't seem so remarkable if you weren't aware of what lurks at the other end of the gastronomic scale.

It doesn't mean bland and functional music; there's plenty of that. I mean music so awful it stuns you into silence with its very wrongness. The music industry has largely eradicated it: more self-conscious in the age of illegal downloading than ever before, they use market research and focus groups to ensure that no real howlers slip through the net.

They are abetted by a legion of ruthlessly professional songwriters-for-hire and cutting edge hip-hop and R&B producers, who will work with anyone as long as the price is right; they add a cool urban urban sheen to a single by Alan Titchmarsh if his cheque had enough noughts. Their combined efforts can't make Paris Hilton sound great, but they can make her sound all right: bland and functional but not as appalling as you might expect.

It was not ever thus. British Pop traditionally embraced the wonky and the wrong. While America has always churned insipid, orthodontically perfect pop moppets from Doris Day to the Stars of High School Musical. Britain consistently made stars of people that any normal country would pass a law to prevent entering a recording studio.   

So thank heavens for Joe Whiley's Radio 1 show. It features something called the Live Lounge, in which hit making artists are inveigled to perform cover version of unlikely songs. The results, unwittingly, make it Britain's last bastion of horrendous music, an oasis of shocking tat, untouched by marketing research and the ministrations of songwriters for hire. No one, for example, suggested to Caucasian Welshman the Automatic that covering Kanye West's  ''Gold Digger''  -a song in which, you may remember, West admonishes a female for not  ''messing with no broke niggers''  -might sound eye poppingly offensive, like some ghastly NME sponsored remake of The Black And White Minstrel Show.

Similarly, no one stopped Keane performing a medley of Christina Aguilera's ''Dirrrty'' and  ''Bootylicious'' by Destiny's child, conjurring up the distressing mental image not merely of vocalist Tom Chaplin getting dirrrty, but also his flabby white ''jelly'' bouncing around while he does so.

Understandably, with this sort of thing, you have to search about on download sites to find these songs, but it's worth it. You emerge from the experience of listening to them traumatised, but refreshed. Play a great record afterwards and it sounds wonderful: nowadays don't seem so average after all.    

And then,  as the real world goes, Nothing Good Comes Easy!

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Greece. See Ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless : ''A Powerful Lightweight''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless