The Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany produced Thomas Mann. Postwar America gave the world JD Salinger and Tom Wolfe. Revolutionary France gave us Rousseau.
2008 America gave us the MTV Video Music Awards. If the aforementioned yardstick bears any truth at all, we're totally fucked.
I didn't watch the whole thing. I couldn't. But I watched enough to understand a few things about the generation that we can expect to hand the wheel of the ship of state to in not too many years.
1) No song makes it these days without at least one "featured" credit and liberal use of the vocoder. I didn't hear one natural voice among the nominated songs, not even from those performers who have made it on their voices. Overproduced and undernatural. If that's any indication of the future, we can expect to see the "RoboSing 3000" topping the charts sometime very soon.
2) All the songs are gimmick songs, owing great debt to the looming, all-encompassing cultural legacy of such greats as Sam the Sham and whoever the hell sang "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini." Honestly, is "I Kissed A Girl" that much different? And am I the only person who remembers THERE WAS ALREADY A SONG CALLED THAT? ABOUT THE SAME THING?
3) As Amelie Gillette points out in her indispensable The Hater blog at The AV Club and my lovely wife pointed out yesterday, the set looked like shit, as it always does. If your goal is to numb the young masses into believing that the music you chose to cram down their throats, hadn't you better shell out a bit more to make the thing look good? After all, if you're only go to show videos once a year, you'd better come correct.
4) Music today -- at least the music represented as "the most..." by MTV sucks today. I never thought I'd find myself being nostalgic for The Spice Girls and John Mayer's first record.
I'm too depressed by it to continue talking about it.
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