I live in the boondocks, I don't listen to the radio nor watch MTV, and I've no friends nearby who are passionate about music. What's a feral boy to do in order to be informed about the latest hep music, the newest phat beatz? Well, he reads about new releases (yes, it's like watching dancing about architecture...) in newspapers and magazines (Rolling Stone, WIRED) and then he hits the internet for deeper research on the leads he's uncovered. I found myself doing just that over the last few days, bird dogging Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Best Songs Of The Year". I spent several hours following links to YouTube videos, Rhapsody streams, and downloading bittorrents, and I can now say that I would not want to listen to the great majority of those songs again.
[I'm watching The Daily Show as I write this. Jon Stewart is interviewing Fox News's Chris Wallace. "Super Tuesday", Jon asks, "What makes it 'super'?. Do ladies drink for free?"]
Maybe it was a bad year for music. Perhaps RS's editor possesses a critical eye more rarefied than my own, such that we cannot abide the same aesthetic values. When Lil Mama repeats, over and over (and over yet again), that her "lip gloss is poppin" over a minimalist beat (a sample of a locker door slamming?), it just doesn't speak to me. It may be that as I've aged my musical heart has hardened. Whatever.
More disappointing than the dearth of good songs, though, were the comment sections for the YouTube clips, where viewers have posted - using perplexing syntax - the most inane things, some directed to the "artist" (as if Avril Lavigne is sitting at home waiting for validation on her new video), others directed at fellow commentators (flame wars over who is the bigger fan), a few seem to be randomly typed gibberish, and of course there is the occasional spam-like ad. And these comments (e.g., the koan-like "what a boobs!!if my girlfriend has that i do sex with she all time!!!") can number into the hundreds of thousands, as if there is something to add to the "discussion" which wasn't elaborated in the first thousand posts.
Is this the "wisdom of the masses" that I've read of, the interactive engine of Web 2.0?
3 comments:
In the form of an SAT question:
Phat beatz is to music as
c)typing is to playing piano.
Music has gone downhill since 1977, when it peaked with the release of "Rumours".
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