Havin been substantially bored by hearing about the strangely sucessful but utterly crap Artic Monkeys album, I thought it best to put straight what music should be about….
Rule 1. Music does not necessarily have to be good to be popular and sell well. For example, the Arctic Monkeys, their music (if you want to go as far as calling it that) is nothing special at all, in fact they really dont deserve to be signed at all, let alone have an album out. Yes, what they did gaining all of their support on the internet is an amazing thing, but it would be even more amazing if the result turned out to be something listenable. This time unfortunately it is not. Their success is largely the result of crazed fans (with no taste at all, may i add) spreading the word out to the public, who thought: “What the hell, lets just buy some of this crap to support this poor band and see what it is like…” And that is what they did… Just wait, in a month or twos time, people will have them lying around their houses thinking “Why did I go with the crowd and spend money on this?” The result of this will be that there will be thousands of cheap copies of the album trying to be sold on eBay and Amazon Marketplace.
If the Arctic Monkeys aren’t strong enough evidence for this… why not go back to the 70s when Punk music was rife…. This music was essentially terrible after the amazing music that was being produced in the late 60s and the early 70s, eg Zeppelin, Cream, Doors, Sabbath, Floyd etc. Although this music was probably better than the Arctic Monkeys will ever be… It is the same kind of thing happening, which leads me onto my next point.
Rule 2. Popular music may represent the feelings of adolescents/young folk who listen to it. A prime example of this, again, is Punk. The people wanted wreckless music, and they got it. The music was there just to get their energy out… to express themselves in a ‘different’ manner. Although this is certainly not a bad thing, the music produced in these kinds of periods is not necessarily the best… in fact, its getting down there with the worst. To put in a modern example, look at the cover of the Arctic Monkeys album, a person smoking… is that what their music degrades to, or is that what they think of modern society? It certainly didn’t have any effort put into it, unlike some other great album artworks… namely Disraeli Gears (by Cream) and the Velvet Underground and Nico (by the Velvet Underground) with the peelable Warhol style banana on it.
So maybe, with music you can judge it by its cover…
