Slapback Guitar Records

I have never seen the music scene as dead as it is now. Since about 2000 I’ve liked less and less new music. In 2008 it totaled less than 10 songs and I’m open to everything.

Some of this is generational. GenY is moving in culturally and GenX is dying out (culturally only – you’d have to read Strauss’ Generations book where this shift was predicted – it’s a repeating pattern) and the demographic spotlight as usual gets younger and younger. Remember Debbie Gibson – she was Miley Cyrus during the last Republican presidency except a little older and with better songs.

When Clinton came in it was like a explosion – music changed forever and it was so exciting. Even film was good – Pulp Fiction to The Matrix, an incredible run of artistic but marketable culture. From Nirvana and ending with the White Stripes debut album in 1999, the Clinton era (coincidental or not) was great. Regardless of your politics (which is mostly genetically predisposed anyway), culturally the 80′s and the 2000′s can’t compare to the 90′s. There are still neo-Grunge bands making listenable music today and the last great album was probably American Idiot done by GenXers.

“Indie” it seems was just a hipster marketing term and indicated nothing more than the high probability of a xylophone solo and pull-forward hairdo. If you call yourself “Indie”, you aren’t. Sorry GenY but you don’t get your define yourself – that’s not how it works. Grunge was a derogatory term. If you get called a slacker, your actually industrious and if you think your generation is the best one that has ever existed then you will actually create nothing of value. Hipsterism takes image to the extreme. It wallows in the facade and eschews the substance with glee. It doesn’t sound like music but it has all of the correct gimmicks in place. It almost seems real – like cultural nutrasweet, a cancerous chemical.

Myspace was created by GenX and is filled with vacuous pics of people with bad hair who use the site and believe by using it they themselves invented it – by simply uploading their pics. Why can’t this generation take a simple picture of themselves without crossing their eyes, sticking our their tongue and/or pursing thier lips ? It’s enraging for some reason but on some level it’s just sad to be so empty and non-unique that you must take every opportunity to stand out in the most obnoxious way.

With the political wind shifting I was really hopeful that by now some new wave would be forming but it actually seems deader than before. Maybe that’s a good thing. I think I’ve been enraged at culture for last 8 years or so whereas now I simply don’t care. It’s more like a void now – or maybe it’s just mirroring the economy.

Maybe we’re entering the age of the one man (person) band. I can dream…and do my own Something/Anything – why not?

The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, “Hey, don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we kill those people. – Bill Hicks

Or they simply just die too soon.