Have you seen the top forty charts recently? I mean actually read the list, not listened to them. God no, do anything but listen to them! You really wouldn't want to subject yourself to such a relentless, brain melting assault like that if, like me you consider yourself a bit of a musical elitist, someone who believes music should be an expressive medium of genuine sentiment, emotion and experience and not a blatant industry cash cow overrun with talentless posers who've been thrust into the spotlight on the back of an inexpressive, vacuous theme tune for idiots, most likely written by less famous idiots who are all being paid for by the kind of puppet masters who pander to the 'casual listener'. The 'casual listener' or 'idiot', is the kind of person who hears a cut-and-pasted version of a Michael Buble song during a sofa ad then decrees that they 'quite like that', thus forcing you to buy them the album for Christmas, reducing your credibility in the eyes of the muso cashier to such a level that they won't even look you in the eye when you try and redeem yourself weeks later by buying a Bombay Bicycle Club album. All this so 'casual listener' can hum along to it in the car for the next five years on repeated circulation.
Record companies love these fickle fans because they know the 'casual listeners', i.e – idiots, far outnumber the avid music fan and their distinct lack of discerning taste means they'll readily dip their hands in their pockets to buy whatever unchallenging crud happens to be flavour of the month at the time.
Of course it's easy to be a music snob and easier still to attack the charts, an institution which was never designed with the music fan in mind. The truth is, if the charts were full of good music, it wouldn't be good music for very long. It would be overplayed, over hyped and discerning cynics like myself who spend all day sneering contemptibly at people having fun from the view of a darkened window would eventually become alienated and find something else to like that no one else had heard of.
But by no means should you be misled by the assumption that this high horse was an easy mount. It takes years of refusing karaoke duets and last dances at the school disco on the grounds of musical taste before you can truly count yourself among the ranks of friendless killjoys the world over who scrawled Smiths lyrics on the inside of their exercise books as a minor act of angst-fuelled anarchy. So it's with such past cultivation along with the fact that I don't really care what the rest of you think, that I take aim at my very easy target. And fire.
So, back to the charts, and you'll be glad to know that at number one (at time of writing) is a song so insightful, they had to abbreviate the title to 'OMG' for fear of overloading their fan's minds with such creative dynamite. The lyrics themselves are awash with cultural references and difficult subject matter relevant to the youth of today:
“This was somethin' special/ This was like dynamite/ Honey got a booty like pow wow wow”
It's enough to make your heart melt, it really is. I even put something similar in my girlfriends valentines card this year. Needless to say 'shawty' was pretty f*cking p*ssed off. And don't think you can steal that line, Usher. I've got this one copyrighted up to the eyeballs.
Never mind, maybe mediocre pub band Scouting For Girls can restore my faith in the charts with their latest slop-fest of a single 'This Ain't A Love Song'. Sadly they appear to be the only band using the conventional band format and real instruments out of all the acts in the whole top twenty list, which already speaks volumes about the rest of the musical polyfiller littering the list. I won't go into detail, but if you've been anywhere within earshot of a radio in the past few weeks, you'd have been lucky (extremely lucky) not to have heard Roy Stride's trademark whining on the subject of some girl who left him (most likely due to the fact that he was a whimpering wet blanket with the lyrical prowess of a brain damaged cattle auctioneer).
So we're not exactly living in the glory days of music at the moment. What with the recession affecting how record companies invest in new artists and how we as consumers spend our hard earned bribery, we're seeing a stagnation of the music scene reflecting the mood of the nation as a whole. You can track this over any recession in the last century. Just take a look at Gary Glitter, Donny Osmond and David Cassidy peppering the top ten in the mid seventies charts; or Rick Astley and Wet Wet Wet leaving a filthy stain on the late eighties chart list.
We're buying cheap and reliable rather than new and remarkable; and with the financial outlook showing no signs of improving until at least next year, I think it's time for me to go into musical hibernation for my own sanity.
