What’s wrong with ‘teen pop’? I could say
that they don’t write their own songs. But hey, some do, don’t they? Most of
them don’t though, so there’s that to begin with. Most don’t even choose their
songs, they are decided by record executives. And on what basis are songs
selected? Positive message? Rebellious spirit? Something to say? A message? Nope.
Sales. And the market for this type of music is? Impressionable youngsters. I
see boy- and girl-bands as factory produced shit designed to fleece money from
school children. To me, it’s as bad as putting junk food machines in schools.
It is cultural and financial robbery.
It could be argued that they don’t play
their own instruments, beyond that, I doubt whether these singers and terrible (I’ll
come to this shortly) dancers have any input into either song selection, or
musical arrangement. Puppets on a corporate string.
There aren’t any ugly ones either. Appearance
has always played a part in pop music. I doubt Elvis Presley or the Beatles would
have been as successful if they looked like me. Today though, looks are a
prerequisite for any budding pop star. You may get a token ugly one in a ‘band’
like the ginger one in Girls Aloud, but that’s beside the point. Knowing a
female who’s a mechanic doesn’t alter that statistic that most mechanics are
males. Having a male friend who’s kindergarten teacher doesn’t….you get the
picture. We used to get ugly pop stars purely because they were talented. Not
now. Now you look at the ‘music’, not listen to it.
Dancing. What is good dancing? Now I like
dancing, I am hugely impressed by amazing dancing. I want to see dancing that
makes me go “Wow! I couldn’t learn that dance if I practiced for a decade.”
Anyone who knows me well knows that I have spent some considerable time on dance
floors. I like dancing, I’m not great at it, but I’m not one of those stiffs
who looks totally out of place on a dancefloor either. Dancing has been a big
part of my life for a long time. I’ve been a big Northern Soul fan for longer
than I care to remember, I wore out my bedroom carpet as a teenager practicing
moves, I’ve DJ’d various genres of dance music, in short, I know a bit about
it. I’m quite old now, and times and styles have changed since my heyday, but I
still think I know good dancing when I see it. And I DO NOT see it in these
boy- and girl-bands. What they are doing is synchronised, and I stress the word
‘synchronised’, rubbish. The next time you see one of these ‘bands’ perform
their dance routine, look at just ONE of them and imagine them doing it alone,
and compare it to a break dancer from the 80s, or a lindy Hopper from the 40s. They
look pathetic. Also, I firmly believe that any semi-competent dancer could
learn any of those faux-dance moves in a day. IN A DAY! There has been
fantastic dancing in and around pop music since the 40s. Now we are spoon fed
crap and told it’s steak by suits in factory-offices. Better not make it too
complicated, they say. If the kids can’t do it, they won’t buy it. If we took
this attitude to sport, we’d lose.
Music, or at least youth culture oriented
music has always been about change. A voice, an ethic, a stance, something to
say. Hippies wanted peace and sang about it, punks wanted change and screamed
about it. Now we have this abomination. It actually doesn’t matter if the songs
are any good – no doubt a few of them are – that’s not the point. We have been
silenced by corporations. Punk happened because they were sick of shitty disco
(not all disco is shitty) and shitty prog rock noodling. But punk also only
happened because they captured an underlying spirit – the people themselves
were pissed off with the same things. Who are those people today? The life has
been sucked clean out of the popular music industry, and we’ve just stood by
and let it happen. Granted not everyone – I know several musicians from back
home who have spent years honing their crafts, they have certainly not stood
idly by, but where is that underlying zeitgeist of rebellion? Of change? Of
creative expression? Not all music has to be furiously rebellious like punk,
look at the hippies, they did it with flowers. Music and cultural movements
like hippy and punk felt like they were government toppling behemoths, changing
the world. These boy and girl bands, teen pop in general do nothing, and say
nothing. They are, nothing. Shitty dancers with auto-tuned voices and pretty
faces, sucking the culture out of the world.
You may think I’m taking this too seriously, that I should lighten up. It’s
only pop music right? And everyone has different tastes. That’s true, and
despite my stance laid out above, I have certainly, over the years, succumbed
to a cheesy pop song. Many times in fact. But there is no rebellion. The teenagers seem
to have given up.
Maybe I’m just old and don’t get it any more. But this is how it seems to me. Teenagers
today seem like a homogenous culture vacuum. When I was young, ‘cool’ mattered.
I wasn’t that cool, but I admired and looked up to those I thought were cooler
than me.
It’s about time suits in offices stopped
deciding what young people listened to. It’s about time something changed.
