American Music

American music sucks. There you go, I said it. I should probably clarify though and say that mainstream American music sucks. I have not listened to an American radio station in years on any regular sort of basis. There's just so much Nickleback and Linkin Park that I can take before I start olympic projectile distance vomiting. There are a number of things that bother me about American radio. First is the DJ. Fake sounding idiots who put on this contrived "extreme" act or, worse yet, laugh at every thing that comes out of their own mouths. Annoying doesn't even begin to cover this. Right now, the local Cincinnati radio station WEBN's (I'm not linking to their site, they don't deserve it) whole marketing campaign is to put huge letters "FU" up on billboards with the much smaller text "frog university" under it because covert swearing is "cool" and "extreme". The commercials are bad but this is just plain lazy. And then, getting back on topic, there's the music. You know what happens when you make a photocopy of a photocopy, right? Then you continue that process and get an unintelligible mess. That's what American music has become. Start with Pearl Jam and continue until today. It used to be, back in the 80s and, to a lesser degree, the 90s that popular rock music could be differentiated into different categories such as alternative, classic, etc. Now it's all labeled "alternative" and it all sucks. You can easily tell the ones that do not suck because they get next to no airplay and often make their music available for free via download off of their website. The problem is twofold in my humble opinion. First, the entire American music scene is no longer being run by musicians and people with a feel for art, it's being run by the RIAA who are basically managerial types and pencil pushers who are more interested in filing lawsuits against people than improving the quality of music in this country. The other is simple laziness in that musicians display a complete failure to experiment and try new things. Some of the biggest bands in their genre have started out attempting something that no one else has tried. REM, Pink Floyd, the Cure - all of these bands have started their own genre by experimenting with music and treating it as an art rather than a means to sex and money.

Lately (as in, the last few years) I've been importing my music from overseas. If you want to try something different, Radio Goethe is a station here in the USA that is run by a German friend of mine named Arndt Peltner. It's all German, Austrian and Swiss bands and the diversity of music that he plays is such that you will almost certainly find something you like. So, that's my plug, give it a listen.