Turning Off the Radio

My internet access has been extremely limited lately due to the demise of my laptop, and my iPod recently suffered a similar fate, causing me to lose thousands of songs. The result of these combined tragedies has been my turning to FM radio as my major source of music – a tragedy in itself. As I’ve been sullenly scanning the airwaves for something that doesn’t completely lack artistic substance and that I haven’t already heard several times in the past hour, two trends have brought themselves to my attention, and both of them have started to frustrate me to no end.

The first of these trends is probably as old as radio technology itself, and I’m starting to wonder whether the general mainstream music audience will ever catch on. Songs on pop radio stations and music television networks (a term I use loosely, considering the majority of the programming on channels like MTV and VH1 have little to do with music) are literally constructed to be short-lived singles that are obsessed over for a brief period of time, overplayed to the point of nausea, and then carelessly discarded to make room for the next song that emerges from the same mold as its predecessor. To exploit listeners’ short attention spans even further, some artists sample from yesterday’s hits, disguising their songs as original material and getting away with it because the songs they create are easy to digest because of their familiarity. The music industry is taking advantage of radio listeners, some too lazy, and others too oblivious to realize they’re being fooled, by cashing in on songs that took very little time or artistic ability to create.

The second trend that I have started to notice worries me more than the first. If you went to Warped Tour this year you probably noticed that the same band played several sets throughout the day, but under a different name and with slightly different songs each time. There is a rise of boy bands disguised as pop punk bands that threatens to become an infestation, and the scene kids that can be found en masse at their shows are just teenyboppers with a different name. These bands are easily identified by the following: pretty, carefully sculpted hair on all of the members, more than one song that contains beats suitable for an audience clap-along, short-lived careers, and nothing that distinguishes them from the other so-called bands in their genre.

These trends are related to each other by the simple fact that they both insult listeners’ intelligence without the listener ever being aware of it. While I am attempting to avoid calling anyone stupid, I am making a suggestion: if the general population of music listeners were to develop more discerning tastes in what they listen to and were to demand more effort from artists, artists will be forced to create music with more substance and a longer shelf life.

As for myself, I plan to dust off my CD collection and turn off the radio.