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With the vast array of CDS that come up each month it should not be hard to find something new to listen to, but the music industry is in turmoil and appears on the verge of self-destruction.
The major music businesses are buying each other out, merging into huge trans-national conglomerates; this would not be a problem if it led to good music and better deals for the bands. The problem is that it has not. Instead, bands are being dropped for 'only' selling a few hundred thousand units. I admit that this is a tiny figure, less than the population of my town, but you can get to UK number one in the singles chart by selling 90,000 copies, showing that no-one is buying what is being offered.
The reason music is not selling is not due to people downloading music illegally, it is due to the fact that there is nothing new being offered. The alternative scene at present is empty: we are offered so-called super-bands, where a few largish names have joined forces and made a side project. The music produced by this side project is usually a pale imitation of the established bands these names come from. However the music is not the focus; it is the fact that you can sucker punters into buying the back catalogue of all the bands in the project.
Look at Probot: they produce an almost utterly indifferent album and a video whose only noteworthy feature is they got a few Suicide Girls to make out for them in it and thus provide the main selling point; quasi-lesbians are big business when it comes to selling music.
Queens of the Stone Age disappeared in a cloud of egos and attempts to grab the limelight. Kyuss are one of the bands that I can listen to almost anytime and it should have been a shock to see what they had become. Regretfully I was not shocked, instead I placed a bet on how long it is before Brody from the Distillers is shipped in to replace the gapping holes left by Mark Lanegan and Nick Oliveri.
Talking of industry females screwing men to get record deals, I have on idea what happened to the last Rancid album, I saw it had charted on the wall of HMV but barely anyone breathed a word of the band or the music. Instead the fact that Tim Armstrong is working with both Pink and Kelly Osbourne made minor headlines of the slow news year that we are embroiled in. Perhaps Tim is trying to fill the anti-Christ superstar void left by Marilyn Manson's departure to play second fiddle to Eminem.
The Darkness are now storming America, who can have them. Even their fans in the UK are getting bored of them. To be fair the US is not always trailing behind, Senses Fail are a pretty major name in some circles in the US, in the UK they are opening for A Hundred Reasons.
Kurt Cobain has been dead for very nearly 10 years and Courtney is marking the occasion by starting the year being high, losing her daughter at the Grammies and chasing men. It is her life but it does not seem to make her happy however much the video for her single 'Mono' depicts her dancing around in a tutu outwitting the media. Her various court cases appear to have delayed the record labels rolling out the inevitable 'Kurt: 10 years on' box set with remastered demos and drugged up ramblings.
Manufactured bands are receiving a backlash, instead magazines try to sell us pre-aged music that has been tried, tested and made to a formula. This is how the Darkness gained success; they are not manufactured in the strict sense but they are not at all original, inspired or fun - it is like eating a pre-chewed meal; easily digestible and utterly flavourless.
I read today that jazz is now hip again. The artists they named were the easy-listening end of jazz; twenty-something white women who sing about the death of their pets while trying to sound 30 years older and black. The album probably looks good on coffee tables in nice middle class family homes.
Meanwhile, I sit and look at a shelf of bands who produced one album before vanishing or who got dropped at the end of last year in the cost-cutter exercises that took place silently and in secret; the music industries very own night of the long knives. 30 Seconds to Mars are on that shelf, as Jared Leto is said to be too busy with Angelina Jolie to want to rehearse anymore. Their half a page of fame is long since gone and I am unsure if they still have a record deal.
Like the serpent in the legend that eats its own tail heralding the end of the world, the music industry will take your money and run before you get past the shiny packaging on the latest hotly-tipped band and realise that it is generic at best. Manson was right for once; we are disposable.
