Lately, I’ve been on an 80’s music kick. For a time, I thought it was a nostalgia thing. I grew up in the late 80’s and 90’s and as such, I hold a lot of love for the creations that were made during those times. Oddly enough, from time to time I’d go even further back. Songs made during the 60’s and 70’s can often be heard in my truck.
But even the 40’s and 50’s make appearances on my playlist. I’ll stop what I’m doing to fully enjoy a Billie Holiday song and if it appeared on the Fallout 3 or New Vegas soundtrack, it’s probably somewhere in my rotation.
Very, very rarely does anything that made it to the mainstream in the modern era appear in my Spotify playlist. I thought it was due to the fact that I’m approaching my 40s and as a result I’ve become set in my ways, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Off-mainstream music is pretty great. I love bands like The Midnight and Lord Huron. New music isn’t the issue. Good music is still good music.
It’s what the mainstream considers to be good music that’s the issue.
I turn on the radio and all I hear is garbage. It sounds over-produced while still sounding hollow. Every time I turn on the radio I find myself turning it back off not soon after.
I’m apparently not the only person suffering from this feeling that things have gotten a bit less substantial, and it hit me about what the issue really is when I saw Pink blow up at Rolling Stone after their latest issue.
According to the New York Post, the pop artist lit into Rolling Stone, calling them irrelevant, for putting style over substance:
“Bahahahaha you guys have been irrelevant since 1990,” the “Get the Party Started” singer wrote in the Instagram comments of the mag’s post.
The article noted high-profile musicians such as Foo Fighters, Dua Lipa, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Eurythmics, Billie Eilish, Alicia Keyes, Ricky Martin and many more.
Pink added, “This is the magazine that used to feature people like John Lennon and Muddy Waters. Hunter S Thompson wrote political pieces. They put Tina Turner on their cover. Then they sold out and all credibility went to s–t when ‘style over substance’ and ‘revenue over authenticity’ went into play.”
The mother of two then called out the outlet for their recent content and reporting, including writing about reality television.
She’s right. I remember when Rolling Stone made Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the cover of their August 2013 issue and posted a photo of him that made him look like it was a cover of Tiger Beat. Teen girls were so taken by him that they began creating fan clubs, each of them proclaiming that society needed to look at him with far more compassion. This is the same Rolling Stone that attempted to frame some students from UVA for a rape they never committed and was forced to pay them handsomely over their defamation.
But it’s not just Rolling Stone.
Looking back over some of the music I’ve been listening to, I realized something.
A lot of the artists I was listening to would never fit the modern mold. Many of these people look as if they could work at a mechanics shop more than they would appear in a music video. Take, for instance, Go West’s “King of Wishful Thinking.” They don’t look like supermodels, their dance moves are corny, and yet this song is far better than anything I’m hearing on mainstream radio right now.
Phil Collins looks like he could show up at your PTA meeting and his face would blend in with the rest of the balding dads.
Rick Astley has one of the greatest hits of mankind in “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and he’s a short, skinny guy with red hair who kinda looks like the kid bullies would beat up in school. Everyone in Toto looks like they’d be more at home at a local race track.
Devo…I don’t need to say more than that.
That’s not to say there haven’t been absolute lookers throughout music history. Elvis Presley had women screaming and crying at his shows. George Michael and Bon Jovi had glam down to a science. Joan Jett, The Bangles, and even Madonna were gorgeous.
But that wasn’t what made them great. The style was secondary. What came first was the music.
Today, the product seems to be taking a back seat to style. The music doesn’t matter so long as the character behind it is sellable. Movies have more flashing lights and CGI than ever before but deliver little in the way of actual watchability. So long as the packaging is good, the product can be subpar.
It’s easy to understand why. The quick buck is still a buck and bucks shell out faster when the product looks good.
Perhaps it’s best to stop buying what the mainstream is selling us and start looking underneath pop-culture for the good stuff.
