The end is not nigh
Buckethead,
It's because you're in your mid-Thirties, and had your hip ticket torn up years ago. Let me cite an example of what you're complaining about, from Johnny Cash. In fact, I'll cite two.
1) On his live collaboration with Willie Nelson for VH-1's "Storytellers", Cash mentions that he stole the tune for "Don't Take Your Guns To Town" from an old Irish ballad, "Clancy Lowered The Boom," and later jokes that Kris Kristofferson always wanted to write a song called "Let's Get Together and Steal Each Other's Songs."
2) The Johnny Cash hit "Ballad of Barbara" steals its tune, whole, from the English Ballad "Barbara Allen." The words are totally different, but it's the same EXACT version of the tune, down to the tempo, that I have heard most often from Appalachian musicians.
Regrettable as it might be sometimes (I'm talking to YOU, Sean "P.Diddy Puffy Daddy" Combs), theft is the one constant in pop music through the ages.
The difference, I think, is that the recombinant tendencies of pop music are much more in the forefront than they used to be, since the radio drives the market. For about six months there, about half the hip-hop on the radio had Pakistani or Indian music samples (NYC taxi-driver music), because one hit had it, and so everybody else did. A parallel example from the golden age would be the time in the 1930s that a troop of Danish yodelers toured the American backcountry for months on end. They were a sensation. The net effect? The early second generation of country music was full of yodels. Still is, if you know where to look.
Also, don't confuse your distaste for excrescent pop music with the decline of music as a whole. You remember the '80s well because the market has worked its Darwinian magic, ensuring that most of what survived from the era was pretty good. You don't remember Calloway, Rick Astley, The First Coming Of Kylie Minogue, or Tiffany because they sucked at the outset, and once they disappeared from the radio, they were gone forever. Ditto the '90s. You don't hear Candlebox that much any more.
But you're getting the current stuff unfiltered, and it hurts, a lot. At the same time, there are a lot of high points in the mediocrity. In twenty years I will welcome Outkast, Ludacris, Nelly (Hot in Herre!!!!!), 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, Christina Aguilera, and even Ashanti's stuff as produced by Irv Gotti back to my ears with great pleasure, as long as we can forget about Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, and Staind.
I would recommend trying not to listen to Top 40 or Adult Contemporary formats. They will rot your brain. In fact the narrowing of radio formats is a symptom of the problem you describe, and I long for the day when you could hear two different-sounding songs back to back on the same station. Like so many other things, the marketing of radio has become so refined and the models so revenue-driven that there is no such thing as music for music's sake, with a few noble exceptions like WFUV in New York, WXPN in Philadelphia, KPIG in San Fran, and their ilk.
[moreover] But you're SO right about sex in the lyrics. It's the audial equivalent of Penthouse (which is RATHER more than I want to see). Insinuation, innuendo, and misdirection are sexy. Talking about fucking is crass. But I would recommend you revisit your old blues records and see if they are all as subtle as you think.
on
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You missed my point about the
You missed my point about the eighties. I do remember the terrible stuff. Astley was one of the ones I had in mind when I wrote that. But being exposed to the unfiltered awfulness of the eighties was a different experience, I think, and not completely related to the fact that I am twenty years older.
I was actually going to mention that what we hear now of the eighties is like a greatest hits album, filtered down to a relatively few good songs. Nothing like the original experience where you'd have to hear five bad songs, minimum, for every decent one.
One benefit, I suppose, of the narrow specialization of radio stations is that if you find one that does play music you like, you'll have a decent listening experience - at least until you get tired of it. When Cleveland's 107.9 "The End" died and was reborn as an Urban Contemporary station, I stopped listening to the radio until I moved to DC.
Twain said that immature humorists borrow, and mature humorists steal. There is truth to that. But remember that Cash at least played the tune for "Ballad of Barbara" and did not merely sing in front of a recording of someone else performing it. Sampling is a crass version of the recombination that happens in all of music - and indeed in writing and other arts. Influence is one thing. Incorporating something into what you're doing is fine, but I can't snap a photo of the Mona Lisa and say that I have created a work of art. (Unless, of course, I'm Andy Warhol.)
Janet didn't perform a Ventura Highway like riff for her song, or limit it to a small tease of a sample. It's her whole song, music performed by America. That sucks. She borrowed the song, she didn't steal it and make it her own - which would have been better.
Ok. I'm with you on the Janet
Ok. I'm with you on the Janet front.
Though I can't know your mind, I know mine. Based upon this one horribly skewed sample, I think that the twenty years between your now-self and your 80's-listening self is a big gap indeed. Back then, you were more credulous about music, more naive, even, as we all were. Your tastes were unformed, and your standards not yet decided.
I enjoyed late period Genesis. Escape Club. late period Cheap Trick. Warrant. I really dug 2 Live Crew. Some of this stuff was my FAVORITE stuff at the time, a prospect which now seems not so much ridiculous as impossible. Yet it's the truth, and it's the (for me) fifteen years of growing and jading that makes the difference.
A similar instance. Have cartoons these days declined from when you were a kid?
Really??? Go back and watch a whole episode of GI Joe or Transformers, I dare you. They suck harder than Courtney Love trying to nose-hoover the last grain of freebase off her shag carpeting. No worse than today's crap cartoons, and no worse, either.
(Of course, then you can mention Looney Tunes and the argument goes all to hell, but let's keep it between the 80s and now, 'kay?)
Cartoons are certainly better
Cartoons are certainly better over the last ten years than during the ten before that. Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Animaniacs, Johnny Bravo, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2001, Dexter's Lab - each one a thousand times better than anything produced in the eighties. (Except for Star Blazers. Star Blazers kicked ass.)
As far as Music goes, I am not a good test case for the twenty years later comparison. I listened to essentially no music at all before high school. My mother listened to sports and talk radio, and my dad listened to news and talk radio. The only albums of contemporary music in my house in my youth were James Taylor's Greastest Hits and Simon and Garfunkel's Graduate soundtrack. It was like the scene in the country bunker in Animal House - What kind of music do you normally have here? Oh, we've got both kinds, Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor.
My tastes in the early eighties were so unformed, so naive, so credulous that I was forced to rapidly and consciously develop taste. Nevertheless, there were gaps for some time after. I was learning about all types of music simultaneously, or nearly so. So I remember how much I thought it all sucked, because I was thinking about it at the time.
I never liked hair metal glam rock, and had to be forced to listen to Metallica (now a favorite) in the early nineties because I assumed it was the same. I was in the position of judging whole subgenres, and ignoring good bands that happened to be near them, rather than liking stuff accidently.
The first album I ever bought was a Barry Manilow live album. Shudder. But, three years later I was a jaded snob. Two years after that, I had loosened up a bit, and had acquired the broadly eclectic tastes that are largely similar to what I have now.
It's funny, now that I think
It's funny, now that I think about it. I like a lot of stuff from right now or from just recently. Cars, music, cartoons, weapons, movies, clothes, industrial design, commercial art, books.
In almost all categories, you have to go back before 1960 to get to good stuff again. Music is really the only exception. Otherwise, with occasional more or less random gems, everything sucked from 1960 to about 1990.
Right on about the filtering
Right on about the filtering of music over time. The bad stuff mostly gets forgotten, while the good stuff remains.
Even beyond that, lots of good stuff that was not big at the time rises to the top over a period years. How many people heard Robert Johnson during his lifetime? Tens of millions of people know his stuff now. Elvis Costello didn't have a charting single at all in the US his first few years, but I'm still hearing "Alison" on radio stations and even in canned tapes playing in grocery and department stores every couple of months.