COLUMN: The stranger side of music
Honey, turn on the TV, looks like Britney Spears got her visitation rights back and Kid Rock got arrested for participation in a brawl, in a Waffle House of all places.
Seriously, what could be more redneck than getting in a fight in a Waffle House?
Any of this sound familiar? It seems a day doesn’t go by without some musician getting into trouble of one sort another. The weird thing is it’s not the musicians most people would expect.
Take 50 Cent for instance. He got his start as a drug dealer in New York and later on in his life was senselessly shot nine times. Nine times, and to come away with only slightly slurred speech, that’s impressive. You’d think a guy with a rough past like that would be involved in all sorts of scandals. Nope, not “Fitty.” He’s kept his nose clean and has a good track record.
The scandals seem to revolve around the people who started out as the good kids of the recording industry but after years of involvement in the lifestyle became corrupted. Lindsay Lohan and Britney are just two prime examples. The semi-seductive “Hit Me Baby One More Time” propelled Britney to fame with, well, mostly just her good looks and sweet demeanor.
Today the tabloids are full of stories about her battle for her kids, her wild lifestyle and her struggle to wear panties when wearing short skirts. It’s OK, I forget to wear my Superman briefs too, sometimes. The bottom line is this is hardly musical.
This being the case, it’s no wonder the musical world of today is more confusing than ever before. Music used to be about, well, the music. Sure there have always been personalities that make the music entertaining, but music has evolved into something that isn’t about music anymore; it’s about trends.
The music of the ’90s is a perfect example. All the progress that was made in hard rock throughout the ’80s was thrown out the window to make room for “divas” like Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. All I know is after listening to that music, I pray my heart will go on.
Fortunately the diva craze was moved to the back burner, but its replacement wasn’t any better: boy band mania. I’m not sure who had the bright idea of taking a bunch of guys in their early 20s equipped only with good looks and songs to woo a 13-year-old female heart, but it should have been one of those thoughts that was stamped out with an, “Eew, that’s gross,” response.
Boy bands like *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys and 98 Degrees were all the rage. It didn’t matter if they couldn’t sing. Who cares? They were just so dreamy.
Maybe I’m just bitter because as long as Lance Bass was on stage, I had no chance with any of the girls in junior high. Not even dying my hair blond and standing around with a permanent goofy smile on my face helped. I’m just lucky the boy band I was about to start never got signed to a record label because before I knew it, the boy band era was over.
Around the same time as the boy band movement, strange songs started popping up like Aqua’s “Barbie” or Eiffel 65’s “Blue.” I still find it amusing that a song about a plastic doll made an incredible amount of money and launched this little group to fame, even if it was only for a year. All I know is the doll may be plastic, but the lyrics sound awful naughty to me.
Around the turn of the century, a new form of music popped up, one that set more trends than any other: the rise of the emo bands. Emo – short for emotional, erratic, eccentric, slit your wrists while writing poems about how the world hates you because you’re different – is a movement I’m pretty confident was started by the depressed kids who watched a little too many vampire movies.
Emo music is painful to listen to. Really, it is. It became popular because it’s really the easiest music to write. It just takes knowing three minor chords on the guitar, having very little experience at playing the instrument, a black notebook full of dark poetry and a voice so whiny that it makes my eardrum think of ways to explode.
The lyrics are almost always depressed, and the music is something of a cross between a ballad and a punk song. I have my fair share of problems in life, but nothing makes them go away quite as fast as listening to songs about how the world abandoned us so we should go slash away our sorrows.
Back when rock and roll was getting started, many called it the devil’s music. They were wrong. Emo is the devil’s music. What else could prompt teenage boys to suddenly dye their hair black (a definite violation of the man code), go to a hair stylist to make bangs cover one eye while being spiky in the back, wear black nail polish and wear pants that not even the skinniest of girls could pull off. Honestly girls, isn’t it depressing when a guy can wear your pants better than you can? Gross.
Emo has taken over high schools. You can see emo kids everywhere. They don’t move. They just sit around and do nothing with vacant expressions on their faces, occasionally writing down a dark thought in their spiral-bound notebook about the football kid in their biology class. Then they go home, pull out mom’s beat-up old acoustic and wail.
The thing I don’t get is I saw this behavior when I was in high school nearly five years ago, and I see it in my younger sister’s peers, but I have yet to see a large concentration of emo college students. Maybe by the time they leave high school, they see the light – probably because they leave their house one day, see the sun actually shining and get a haircut – and become normal people again.
After all the musical trends I’ve seen in my lifetime, I hope we can actually get back to the music and forget about the people. And if glam rock ever comes back, count me out.
Seth Hawkins is a junior majoring in public relations. If you see him in a Wal-Mart checkout line with plus-size women’s pants and a box of razor blades, don’t judge. Comments and questions can be sent to him at seth.h@aggiemail.usu.edu