Ever since 1982 when I so came to hate FM radio that I turned it off for good, I have been exposed only to incidental popular contemporary music. With this window on popular music, filtered as it is by coincidence, disinterest and circumstance, I have been able nonetheless to bear witness to the slow and somehow inevitable near-death throes of top-forty music. It pains me to even call it “music”. It resembles more closely industrial background noise. If you were to go to any major urban area or factory estate or power plant and wind the windows of your car down, you would clearly hear this wash of background industrial noise pressing in on you. If you were to then place your hands over your ears you could block the majority of it out. If you were to alternate removing your hands from your ears and placing them back over your ears again at the rate of 129 revolutions per minute you would be listening to a sound belonging certainly to the same family of sounds as top forty music. Top forty music has risen like a gigantic yet irrelevant monster in the public consciousness. We try to block it out. We try to pretend it must have it’s merits. But deep down we all know that that is a crock of shit. We are too humble, too meek, too polite. We are like the overly obedient co-pilot of a nose-diving jumbo jet. We have some thoughts about how to bring the jumbo out of its nose dive but we daren’t tell the captain, who is either drunk, stoned, demented or all the above. It is worth remembering that just because the captain of the plane you are in is suicidal or incompetent it doesn’t mean there has to be any innocent victims. You can take the control stick. You can have the blithering fool taken back and sedated. You can call the control tower to talk you and the captainless jumbo back down to earth or ask if there is another pilot on board. If you are the co-pilot it is even your duty to be so decisive. But we’ve not been decisive about top forty music. We’ve just shrugged and gone on with our lives and tried to keep the door to the elevator music closed as much as possible.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 13:41:13 +0000
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