Kids These Days, #976 in a Series
There's been a lot said about the utter lack of originality in the music industry recently, by "Charles Dodgson" and Ted Barlow among others. (Barlow also links this piece by Steve Albini about the moral bankruptcy of the industry, which is worth a look.) There's nothing to really get the point across like listening to Top 40 radio for a little while.
I've been subjected to one of the dire local Top 40 stations while working out for the last several weeks, and have heard the dance re-make of the Bryan Adams shmaltz-o-rama "Heaven" more times than I care to remember (it's the Bryan Adams song sung by a woman, more or less straight up, over Generic Pounding Dance Beat #5). It's fairly bad, but I never much cared for the original, so it's not anything I can get all that worked up about. It's a little depressing to think that they need to mine the 80's for dippy lyrics, but maybe they couldn't get the rights to the Frank Sinatra catalogue, or something.
This evening, though, I heard an even worse travesty. The exact same treatment, down to the same rhythm-section-by-computer beat, applied to Don Henley's "Boys of Summer." Now, I'm not going to claim that Building the Perfect Beast was an immortal album, but God damn it, I like that song. It brings back warm fuzzy memories of those halcyon days when MTV actually played music videos, and CD's were a novelty, and I don't appreciate having my nostalgia trip crushed by some talentless bint with a Casio keyboard and the Totally 80's Song Book. It's not even a dance-pop sort of song, as would have been obvious if the people behind this musical assault had taken the trouble to have somebody explain the lyrics to them.
The sooner file-swapping takes down the whole creaking edifice of brainless RIAA drones pumping out unoriginal crap, the better.
Posted at 8:43 PM | link | follow-ups |