For instance, imagine watching a movie that had no music at all in it. Imagine a romance with no music to manipulate your emotions. That would be pretty fucking dull, wouldn't it? Sure, the ones with the sappy, crappy Celine Dion tunes are pretty bad anyway, but imagine if there was no orchestral score to help you along with the way you are supposed to be feeling at certain points in the story? In a country that can re-elect George W. Bush I have to say that at least 51% of the population need all the help they can get. So imagine one of those big, mindless summer action movies like either of the Matrix sequels without music. Yes, even mindless blockbusters use music to manipulate the audience to feel a certain way. That's the power of music. You don't even always realize what it's doing to you.
But imagine those movies without the score in the background. Okay, maybe those are bad examples, since the ONLY thing that could possibly make THOSE films any good is to burn every single print of them, then lobotomize everyone whose seen them so there is no memory of them anywhere. But you get the point, right? Movies without music just plain suck. Even silent movies had music. They just didn't have the actors talking.
How about going to a nice restaurant and not having any background music. Hell, even cheap, crappy places usually have some kind of music playing. Without it you would be listening to a mishmash of yammering voices and their various conversations, and it would drive most people mad.
And what about memories? I know smell is the sense tied most closely with memory, but music is also a pretty powerful factor. How many times have you heard a song on the radio and suddenly remembered an old friend you haven't thought of in years? That happens to all of us from time to time. Or you remember a period in your life, or a specific event or whatever. All because of music.
So why, you ask, am I going on about the importance of music in our lives? Because of what's happened to it. I was going to say because of what's happened to it recently, but the entire music 'scene' has been on the decline for about fifteen years now. Yeah, some people will try to argue with that, and some people will say I just got too old to "get it," but fuck 'em. They're wrong. Music for the most part just sucks now.
Now for the most part when I'm talking about music I mean hard rock and metal. And for the majority of this rant that's what I'll be talking about. But I'll also be throwing some other stuff in there as well. Try to keep up.
I can't really go all the way back to the beginning of music itself, since it would take weeks just to read it, so you can only imagine how long it would take to research and write. So I'll stick with fairly recent stuff.
Big band ruled the forties and fifties, although rock started poking it's head out in the latter decade.Y'know, Chuck Berry and all. The real originator of rock. Not the other guy. The talentless asshole with the swivelling hips. He had NOTHING to do with rock. He was all PR and hips, and I will not even mention his fucking name. But thanks to Mr. Berry and others like him, we had a beginning.
The sixties brought rock to the forefront of music, in spite of the crap the British dumped on us. Yes, I'm talking about the fucking Beatles. They get thrown in the same catagory as he who shall NOT be named, and a few other 'bands' that will come later. Great PR without the talent to match. I mean c'mon. RINGO FUCKING STARR?!? A drunken, one-handed chimp with arthritis and palsey could play better for chrissakes! And the second worst song ever recorded? I AM THE WALRUS? What the fuck is that all about? What the hell were they on when they wrote THAT crap? But the sixties was also when Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper got their starts, so it wasn't all bad.
Then came the seventies,and there was a lot of good music to go around. Sure there was disco as well, which no one in their right mind should admit to once liking. And if they do, their opinion isn't worth shit anyway, since their taste has been so painfully obviously compromised. But there WAS a lot of good rock in the seventies, from Black Sabbath to Alice Cooper to the Gods of Rock themselves, KISS. Sure, we had to deal with overrated drivel like Led Zeppelin, but we also got Rush and Meatloaf and Neal Young and Bob Segar and Queen and Styx and The Who and countless other great groups and singers. Music was fun to listen to.
Then came the eighties and the music changed, but for the better. Disco was out, for one thing. And that alone would be enough to make thingts better. But there was oh so much more to come! What an exciting time this was to be growing up. After all, this was the height of hair metal, which is absolutely the most fun music has ever been. Sure, most of those bands weren't all that musically gifetd, (although they ALL had crap like the Beatles beaten hands down,) but they weren't really trying to be. They were having fun. They were throwing a party every night, and 12,000 people were invited each time. Besides, if you were looking for more gifted musicians there were bands like Iron Maiden and Dio. And you could always listen to jazz or blues if it was musicianship you were looking for, although you had to look a little harder to find that stuff. But it WAS still available.
Of course, the eighties weren't ALL great. You still had talentless hacks forced upon you by the radio. These maggots seem to work their way into the music scene no matter what the decade. And the eighties was no different, as evidenced but shit like Madonna and Prince and the king of child molestation himself, Michael "I Like to Touch Young Boys Inappropriately" Jackson. Not too mention unfiltered sewage like Culture Club or Kajagoogoo, (what the FUCK?) or Duran Duran.
And who could forget A Flock of Seagulls? Yeah, their 'music' is easy to forget, but nobody EVER cared about that anyway. What was up with that fucking HAIR?!? Singer/keyboardist Michael Score had to be just about the goofiest looking fucker of the decade. And with a decade like the eighties, that's quite a feat! People paid attention to this 'band' for a few years just to see what he was going to look like next. MTV is solely to blame for this atrocity being perpetrated on an unsuspecting public, because there's simply NO WAY this group could have ever gotten anywaher with the level of musical talent they possessed.
But the eighties also gave us Motley Crue, and Twisted Sister, and Quiet Riot, and Whitesnake. And later, Warrant and Poison and Firehouse and Cinderella and again, a host more like them. All of them were cheesy, and all of them were fun. And some of the older acts from the seventies, like Ozzy and Alice Cooper and KISS found new life with a new style of music and a new look. All in all, life was good.
Then something happened. While there was nothing wrong with any of this music, there always has to be one idiot who isn't satisfied. Yes, change is good, and change is necessary, and these bands were themselves changing. But radio, being the fickle child that it is, didn't think that was good enough. And one moron decided the world needed something like Nirvana. Now, as any psychologist will tell you, kids are an impressionable bunch. Disc Jockeys told kids Narvana was good, and kids thought Nirvana was good. For some reason radio doesn't cater to the people who actually pay the bills, which would be adults, but instead they play to the younger crowd. So Nirvana got heavy airplay, and the record companies took this to mean the music was good, and rushed to sign any group of guys from Seattle who sounded like they had never touched their instruments before that day, and looked and smelled like they hadn't bathed in several months. They didn't care that the people who had JOBS, the people who paid their bills still wanted to hear the good stuff, and not this shit. Sure, most of those bands from the eighties were still recording and touring, but they had to do it with no promotion or backing from the record companies.
So the music industry supported this lower form of noise for the next few years, depressing the hell out of everyone. The people who wanted real music that didn't suck more than a two-dollar whore were depressed by the lack of said good music, and the people who actually listened to this shit were depressed because it was depressing music. That's what it was designed to do - depress people. Because the people who were writing it were themselves depressed. And why shouldn't they have been depressed? A bunch of unwashed nimrods with no discernable talent were suddenly wealthy superstars, idolized by millions of drug-addled zombies everywhere. They had more than they could ever wish for, so of course they were depressed. And they were fucking idiots.
This trend continued until the king loser, Kurt Cobain got all hopped up on whatever his drug of choice was that week, and blew his own useless head off. To this day I don't understand why people got so upset about this. Personally, I would be more upset about some insurance adjuster in Iowa getting killed, but that's because I don't like listening to unadulterated crap, and I know that nothing positive was gained by Cobain and his ilk. I said then, and I say now, good riddance. The only sad part of this whole mess is his kid. One day that kid will have to grow up and learn what a useless, gutless, talentless loser his dad was. That's sad.
So Cobain removed his hat-rack with a shotgun, and some of the other bands realized that maybe this form of 'music' really did suck. But they had nothing to replace it with, because none of them could actually PLAY their instruments. So in stepped country, which enjoyed quite a bit of popularity for a few years. Until the Gods of Rock, KISS decided to bring back the four original members for a reunion tour. Then it was okay for real rock to come back out again.
But while all this was going on, another disease was spreading itself over the musical landscape. Rap, or Hip Hop, which is the same fucking thing. People I have talked to say they like this because it has a beat you can dance to. To this I say hogwash. Rock has a beat too, but unlike rap it gains its beat from musicians. Rap is produced by people whose only talent is rhyming. There is absolutely, and I mean ABSOLUTELY nothing musical about this trash. Some people say they like rap music, and I say no they don't. There is no such thing as rap music. It doesn't exist. There's rap, or there's music, but the two have never mixed, and they never will because there is not a single rapper out there with even the smallest iota of musical talent. That's why they rap - they simply cannot do anything else.
All you have to do is listen to shit like Eminem. Now here is someone who desperately needs to be shot in the balls with a fucking bazooka. Not only does he not have the slightest shred of musical talent, but he also has absolutely no worth as a human being. Just hearing his name is enough to send people with even a modicom of good taste into a blinding rage, not because of his lyrics, but because he is a giant trouser stain. A blemish on humanity. A skid mark on the underwear of life. You get the picture.
I don't know where we go from here. There are still good bands out there, but they aren't young guys anymore. They're all middle-aged and they can't keep going like they used to. A few bands have stepped up, such as Hammerfall, but none of them is from this country. Once again, America falls behind the rest of the world. You know, for a world leader, we seem to do that an awful lot lately. Hopefully we can have some bands step up soon. It would be a shame not to have any new good music to listen to anymore. All of us with good taste need to pitch in and let the music industry know that we won't accept this shit they're shoveling at us anymore. Give us something decent to listen to or we will help all the young punks get all their music for free on the internet and keep these 'artists' from making a fucking dime. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.
And while I'm wishing for the impossible, such as good taste from the youth of America, I have one other wish. As much as I love the music of KISS, is there any way to arrange having someone in the studio the next time Gene Simmons goes in there? Someone who will tell him what he is recording without the rest of the band, in any of its various incarnations, is complete and total crap? His last solo effort, Asshole, was a complete waste of time. The only track that's even bearable is the title track. Without the rest of KISS to help him along, Gene hasn't a clue what good music is. Could someone please help him? Thanks.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go listen to the new Judas Priest album. At least I know that won't suck. Rock on, (if you can find any real rock.)