A number of items have come across my radar screen over the past few days that have really made me question my faith in humanity. Here are a few of them.
1) Pat Robertson effectively orders a hit on a foreign president over the Christian Broadcasting Network. Do I even need to explain this? I mean, the footage of Pat Robertson praying so that Supreme Court justices would retire was weird enough. This, well, this explains my viewpoint that fundamentalism of any type is typically a bad thing.
2) A television station in Utah refused to air a commercial that takes an anti-war stance. Because obviously, if there is one thing that America stands for it is making sure that the other side is not allowed to be heard. This is something that really galls me. I am a free speech advocate and that means that I have defended the rights of people to say really bad and stupid things because I believe that is the most important right that we have: to say what is on our mind without fear. Now I wonder how true a statement that is.
3) The cable news channels are now covering everything except what is important. Look, I live in (or at least work in) Kansas and there is no need to have day after day of coverage on the BTK killer. Yes, he is a serial killer who did horrible things. But the story is that after a number of years he was captured, he confessed to the crimes, and has been sentenced to effectively life in prison. I just described the story in two sentences. This doesn’t require a two hour Dateline NBC special. It doesn’t require CNN to cover it from every conceivable angle. I’d much rather gain insight into the Army’s discussion of a contingency plan of requiring 100,000 troops in Iraq for the next four years and that gas might stay at over three dollars a gallon for a while.
4) They have released the best of America’s Funniest Home Videos on DVD. A four disc set to be exact. Almost nine hours of guys getting hit in the crotch. As a capitalist, I’m proud of the producers who will make a ton of money by having people send them free footage and then selling it to others. I just feel sad knowing that this set will outsell shows like Sports Night by a factor of fifty. I understand that media flows to the lowest common denominator, I just wish that it wasn’t that low.
5) Mandy Moore has a Best Of album. Didn’t you at least had to have a semblance of a career before in order to achieve a Greatest Hits compilation? Or be a combination of brilliant and unheralded (like Kelly Willis and Beth Orton)? Now it looks like you need two albums and no signature songs and you’ll be good to go.
I still hold out some hope. You have the guys in Old Crow playing music for the joy of playing. They can’t be in it for the money, when you have six guys on stage and three of them are playing the banjo at the same time you aren’t dreaming of platinum sales. That’s what I like finding still exists. Something real and pure.
1 comment:
EC,
I'm going to take this opportunity to join today's blog post with the yet to be called in promise to analyze any subject picked by the readers. And no, it won't be the CAP-M pricing model.
The 'make 2 albums with no good songs then release a greatest hits cd' thing has bothered me for some time. Mandy isn't the only one to do this either. Most of the teen idols of today have done this. When you only have 2 or 3 albums, and none of them have been packed with hits, recompiling a greatest hits album is not only superfluous it's wrong. It is a bastardization of what, in my mind, music is supposed to stand for.
So here is the topic I would like to see Battling The Current ruminate on: What has happened to the music industry? Is it indeed going to hell in a handbasket as the 'music business' becomes 'business music'? Are the Jessica Simpsons, Mandy Moores and Avril Lavignes of today any more shallow and vapid than the Monkees and Leif Garretts of yesteryear? It seems to me that there was a time when you didn't have to be a cover model to get a record deal. When artists released records with more than one good song in an attempt to stretch their limited talent over more albums. Finally, will this ever end? Will the large record labels ever stop regurgitating talentless pop bands and feeding them to the public, telling them what they should like? Will artists like Kelly, Tift, Lucinda, Richard B, Alejandro, etc be forced to live on the fringe to avoid sacrificing their art at the altar of pop culture to appease the gods of capitalism? Gods with names like Warner, Epic, & Sony? Troubling signs indeed.
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