"Real Music"

I realized in my last post i made a reference to 'real music', a word that is almost totally devoid of meaning in most cases and is a byword to many of slightly superior opinionated types clinging to their respective eras or tastes, and this largely is true. But there is another sense, a sense that chart music has lost its way more than ever at the moment and there is very little chance of an act emerging unchewed-up by the machine that would aim to make them famous in the first place.

Take for Example Ed Sheeran; a man that seems heavily influenced by Damien Rice (and  everyone i know thinks is their little secret despite having a no.1 single). Fair enough not a bad thing to be influenced by, his style has up until now been very acoustic and very heart-felt. He is no doubt a very talented individual.  But his new single seems pretty heavily 'steered' in the more Bruno Mars/ urban direction. There are different versions of the song but this seems to be the 'official' version of the single and it production is almost slick enough to slip on. Im not against good production but it seems a little sad that now he is being pushed as "The next big thing" his sound is suddenly more rap and hip-hop than it was before simply to help it be camouflaged in the charts. Now im not an industry insider and i don't really know what is goin on but this is just one example of a wider homogenization that i realize has been going on for decades but now seems almost total.

Not to sound like a dinosaur but there was a time when a man who stood on one leg and played the flute could be number one. Now lady Ga-Ga is considered out there, a bland pop-star with manufactured controversy and an almost robotic regurgitation of past styles into some ungodly mish-mash of "Throw-it-against-the-wall-and-hope-i-look-cool". It feels somehow false, beneath it all lady gaga is simply... boring. Her music is boring, all i have heard her talk about in interviews is who designed what and how much she "loves all the fans" in that super plastic LA fashion. She is boring. She is mediocre.  all this mystique, window dressing and bullshit is meant to jangle keys in-front of you to make sure you don't notice. She is the ultimate expression of how the industry has run out of ideas.

Gaga here, with her concept album highlighting the very real problem of motorbike related birth deformities.

The music industry is still in disarray over how badly file-sharing is kicking their collective market models in the arse but this is a seperate issue for another day. All we have now is an emerging market of very similar dub-step and a chart full of nothing but purposely manufactured club bangers. Perhaps i am just a hipster doucebag elitist but it would seem to me that music need a good kick up the arse stylistically that simply seems impossible in the current situation. So yes i do believe some music has more merit than others but thats mainly because it does. I'm an opinionated man in a world full of things a disprove of. Objectivity and pandering be dammed.