And, oh my - the music blog is actually about music this time!
Before we moved home about a year ago, we had Freesat attached to an old Sky dish a previous tenant had left behind, and therefore access to niche rock TV channels NME TV and Scuzz. Now we have to make do with Freeserve, which has only populist dross like 4Music; exposure to the chart shows on these channels has come as something of a shock. I've been largely ignoring the general charts for the best part of thirty years, and had become coccooned in a sort of indie bubble which tended to exaggerate the importance of the sort of music I was listening to. Now, in parallel with my feeling that almost all of what calls itself indie is now total rubbish (nothing but a marketing category aimed at cider-addled middle class university students), recent experience with the "official" charts has rammed home an uncomfortable point: rock music is dead.
The charts are full of music that can be categorised as urban, dance or whatever. Rock and indie is almost entirely absent, and when it does show up tends to be in its most debased forms. To take the current chart (curiously dated August 4th), the handful of entries are as follows:
No.1 Florence and the Machine - Spectrum
Number One! A good start, you might think. But the version being shown in the video charts is a Calvin Harris remix, producing the uncomfortable feeling that La Florence may end up drifting off into Sharleen Spiteri territory, as the stunt voice in mediocre pop pot boilers. Nor is Florence unequivocally an indie act, being more in the tradition of English pop eccentrics such as (the obvious reference) Kate Bush.
No.2 Maroon 5 - Payphone
No, scrub that. Maroon 5 are no more a rock band than I am a professional footballer. Also, this is an awful, awful song, with a deeply idiotic overblown video made by morons on crack.
(pans down the chart ... dum de dum ... who is Conor Maynard? - oh gods, it's the English Justin Bieber ... dum de dum...)
No. 11 Coldplay & Rihanna - Princess of China
Urgh. Britains dullest band paired with Rihanna. Boredom ensues, with another imbecilic video which seems unable to tell the difference between China, Japan, Korea and, for all I know, Norway. Coldplay have become the contemporary bellwether for lack of musical taste, the favourite of unhappily married sales executives in Vauxhall Insignias who think they're soulful. Wrong. They're stupid, and so are you.
No. 13 Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe
No, it's not remotely rock or indie, but the video is interesting (in the way that a Nigerian scam email is interesting). Despite the fact that Jepsen's drippy princess pop is 100% machine tooled, with no human intervention beyond setting the Autotune on her feeble voice, the video shows her playing with a band. In a garage. The traditional 4/5 piece electric rock band remains the icon of musical authenticity, even when it has become increasingly irrelevant, and is wheeled out to suggest that CRJ is one of "us", even when she's merely the vacuous disposable puppet of a cynical marketing engine. Shameless.
No. 25 Gotye - Someone That I Used To Know
This has got airplay on "alternative" stations like XFM, but really it's just singer songwriter guff. This song has been an enormous success, but I can't stand it. The first half putters along inoffensively enough, though I can't say I like his voice, but then it turns into a "conversation" song with the latter part inverting the former. And I never like that sort of thing. It's trying too hard to be clever AND sensitive, and I want to hit it with a cricket bat.I can't be assed to put up the video. If you haven't seen it by now, meh.
No. 40 Ed Sheeran - Small Bump
Another one who gets onto the "indie" radio, and again it's singer songwriter drivel. I haven't heard this one, but the songs of his I have heard are appalling, and he's an annoying ginger twat. Hint, Ed - when your second (second!) single (You Need Me, I Don't Need You) whinges about other people trying to coat tail your talent, you are a conceited arsehole. I refuse to post any links to this horrible little leprechaun, who has inevitably been garlanded with BRIT Awards, and an Ivor Novello for the mawkishly horrible "A Team".
And that's it. One MOR rock group (and they're paired with an R&B siren), a loopy electro-folk belter, a handful of indie-ish nothings, mostly rubbish, and the rest is the likes of Nicki Minaj, Flo Rida and Katy Perry. Rock music has been shoved off into its increasingly irrelevant niche to be forgotten.
Rock is dead. Or is it? (To be continued...)
EDIT: Soundcloud link retired 2/1/2013
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