Most Music is Just a Hustle.
So they called it popular music and you adopted it as your own. They've got you fooled. An easy mark. What a sucker.
It reminds me of classical composers who couldn't come up with their own
melodies so they stole them from the popular peasant music of their day.
But at least back then it had melody. But now they mass produce that
canned tripe of repeating-phrase three-minute excuses-for-music and you guys
bought into it. You supported it. You never bothered to find out,
you just accepted that it was music.
Here you had the chance to become the greatest civilization in existence and you flubbed it.
Not that anyone can blame you, right. Your excuses were things like,
"oh, let the kids have their fun" or "I learned to live with it,
why can't you?" or "oh, it doesn't bother me, it just goes in one ear
and out the other".
What could be more pathetic? I'm ashamed of you, a bunch of lazy underachievers. You have usurped the rightful place of those who would have done something were they in your position.
The kind of music you have been producing was started by a bunch of stone age yuppies out there social-climbing and beating on a log six thousand years ago.
If you were a real pioneer of the art of music, you'd be out there going beyond the horizon, crossing new barriers, really coming up with something truly great. But wouldn't you know, if there's money to be made, the fakes will come out of nowhere to block the way. It must be true that money ruins anything it touches.
When I was a cab driver the second time in 1993 in New York City, I drove a lady who owned many of the radio stations in big cities throughout the United States. They just would send out a feed on satellites classified as "urban rock", and the stations would just play the same music in each locale as was being played nationally everywhere else with the same "satellite feed" with nothing but an engineer in attendance during the days. I said I knew the station in the area and offered to play it for her on the cab radio. "Oh, no!" She retorted, "I hate that stuff".
"You hypocrite!", I thought. "I hate it too, but I'm always forced to listen to it against my will by every boom box blockhead on the street and and every neighbor stupid enough to like it." Twirl the radio dial, that's all that's on these days, practically. They bought everybody else out. And here she was, promoting something she knew was tripe, just so she could get rich. What's wrong with that? Plenty. But the worst offenders were the ones listening to the stations. They never took the trouble to find out what was really going on.
A couple of months back, in, I think it
was 2004, this year (when this article is being written), a small town in
America had a train wreck and the cars were spewing poison gas. The people
called the local radio station to make some sort of announcement to help with
the evacuation since lots of people were listening, and they go no answer.
There was nothing there but a robot playing satellite feed. That's it,
sucker. You just don't care, do you? You've lost your culture,
you've lost your creativity, you got bought off and you just don't know what's
really out there and you don't care anyway. So go ahead. Roll over
and die. I want you to survive, but you've got the chance of a snowball in
hell of doing it.
Who says a song has to have a repetitive refrain? Who says the base has to support the melody? Who says
tympani has to be tympanic? Oh, you do. So that makes you an jackass at best and a sucker at
the worst.
Now they cut and paste, and repeat the same melody or beat five or six times and
call it a song. And people pay for that! Imagine. I could coin
a term, "There's a Mozart in every crowd". Only these guys are
keeping him down so it's Mozart the garage mechanic and Brahms the bus driver
and Beethoven the dishwasher. Kept down by the current payola pop stars.
Why have you let these uninspired children with their unending belly-aching become your pop stars? It has to be only one thing. Gullible. Well, maybe that's not you. Maybe it's all those morons that paid for it. They killed music. They have nothing. It's a morbid, lifeless, selfish society that's doomed to oblivion. They are already forgotten.
Music can go further than anyone ever realized. It can be more exciting, more beautiful, more
exquisite than ever in history if you help the appropriate geniuses go ahead and compose. They don't even need to be rich, though if they make the breakthroughs, they'd deserve to be. All they need
is subsidy; the equipment, the room and board, the healthcare. And believe me, that's a bargain compared to what you get out of it: National treasures, vast income for swaths of the population, a rise in the income of the recording industry, a workforce enlivened and inspired for a change instead of dragging and moping around all the time, the list goes on.
Take care of the honest musicians and they'll take care of you. In the days of the historically great composers they were
renowned in their time. Their contemporary societies benefited from them and
basked in the glow of their
genius and creativity.
Now we've just about beaten the oldies to death with repetition. Nobody seems to be able to top the ancients, such as Bach or Mozart. There are not true classics in our time, though they are out there. But the rest of you have starved them out with your stupidity and greed. Nothing is left but zit-faced rock stars promoted by the good old payola. Only now it's the labels doing it. The mob was smart enough to get out of that racket. Maybe they are more noble than those cheap mass-music hustlers.
Business needs to get out of the music game. They aren't musicians. Eventually the public will reject it. -- And has.
Because they don't know what they're doing in music; they're ignorant.
What we need are a few kings and nobles and patrons of the arts.
That's why the music rackets are going belly up right now. They want to blame it on Knapster or the internet, but if they had the real stars whose stellar careers are now blocked by the mindless music industry, the world would have beaten a path to their doors. It's their own fault. They wanted to stick with the winners and they're nothing but losers.
Now all that's left is dry performances of music history composed by those who were subsidized by kings and nobles hundreds of years ago. It proves that there's nothing noble about this generation. Nothing but a cheap shot, going belly up, soon to be lost in oblivion, the civilization that wasn't, soon to die out with the baby boomers and their tin pan ally pop music. It's a hustle, you idiot. Don't you get it? -- Nothin but a cheap hustle.
Click here to see the digital art used for the background for this page.
It's a morbid, lifeless, selfish society that's doomed to oblivion.
Most music is just a hustle.
Copyright (C) by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
What we need are a few kings and nobles and patrons of the arts.