By Michael Rutschky
Published on December 5, 2007
Music is my passion. Well, next to journalism and comic books music is my passion. I was in a Punk Rock band back in New London, Connecticut called The Model Citizens (a real punk band, not some annoying group of teenyboppers that got together, learned how to palm mute a guitar, and wrote songs about high school). Even though we only ever got around to playing two official shows, we felt like the kings of the world and playing those two shows was like the most powerful feeling of liberation I’ve ever known.
Now that I’m living in P-cola I don’t have a band anymore, but I’m still obsessed with music, although I was always generally disgusted and saddened with the stuff I’d hear coming from the mainstream music industry.
In my opinion this country is living through a Great Creative Depression. On top of this, the music that is most promoted and peddled looks to me like just a trendy form of advertising. I’m typically not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I think that when the conditions are convenient enough for certain people, you have to call it like you see it and here’s how I see it.
Art has always been the backbone of ideological revolutions (Note: if you catch me talking about a musical revolution, I don’t mean “revolution” as “toppling the government” as much as I mean it as “taking music back from the old crusty businessmen who control it”). When people want to show their distaste with the status quo and promote a new system of beliefs, or even if they just want to make a connection with hundreds of strangers in a striking and visceral way, they use art.
Author Robert Anton Wilson said that art is propaganda, just like the military and government use; the difference is that art is seducing people to your world view or belief system while government propaganda is more like raping someone’s mind with those beliefs (this article, can in fact, proudly be classified as punk rock propaganda).
In America, when the youth or working class try to take a stand the artistic medium they use is music: folk, rock and roll, and rap. Nowadays, music, the most powerful voice of American dissent, is commercialized to the point that kids don’t even know that it’s there for them to use.
The last little “revolt” was grunge, in which the kids were pissed off and knew they were screwed out of something, but just wanted to be mopey and angry instead of change anything. Before that was punk rock (love it), and even further back, the hippy movement (sure hippies are annoying, but when they began they were on their way to really changing things).
Not only is pop music stronger than ever, having successfully parodied every other form of decent music, the kids are lazier than ever. What kind of bands are kids forming? Bands where they piss and moan about pretty girls that won’t sleep with them (Note: I think it’s important to clarify, though, that the subject of a song can be anything in the world as long as the artist’s heart is in it, and they’re not just doing it to be cool or make money).
How about rap music? We went from “Fight the Power” to “My Humps.” What was once the voice of the oppressed is now dumbed-down chanting over beats that sound like simple ringtones.
What was once an outlet for new ways of thinking is now a clever way of getting kids into malls. It’s as though someone somewhere decided that they had to shut all the artists up before they lost their power, but then a little light bulb went off and they realized how much better it would be if they co-oped music and made it a medium for their advertising. Turn on the radio, MTV, the Internet, whatever. This isn’t art anymore; it’s a covert commercial.
This boiled my blood for years, but then I realized something: it doesn’t matter. These industry guys can put out all of the stupid pop albums they want with their overpriced corporate music stores and DRM-protected mp3s, but music will always be free; it will always mean freedom. There’s always going to be that kid in his room playing guitar or scratching on his Dad’s old James Brown vinyl’s. That primal sonic outlet has been there ever since man first banged on a drum, and it will be there forever.
So listen to whatever you want to, after all, at the end of the day all music is beautiful. Just remember what it’s there for. It’s not a get rich quick scheme, and it’s not a way to get on TV. It’s not there for corporate America, it’s there for you; it belongs to you.