artists only

Doesn't anyone wanna be different, anymore?

With the ability to record an album in your bedroom (which I could never do because then where would I sleep?) and build your own MySpace band page with which to spam the world, it seems there are more bands than ever, yet fewer than ever with anything remotely original or interesting to say.

With everyone trying to grab their own fifteen minutes, artistry has given way to opportunism wherein anyone who takes a steaming crap on a delusional rap star’s floor is rewarded with their own reality show.


Meanwhile, rock bands have completely lost the plot. mistaking anger for passion and O-faces only a mother could love while slamming the shit out of your five-string wood-grain Peavey bass for intensity.

I caught a band a few nights ago (at a club next door to the sushi restaurant where I deposit a majority of each paycheck) that were about as committed to the cause of rock & roll as you can be while wearing pants around their ankles (them chain wallets must be heavy), black nail polish, and guitar straps made to look like bright yellow police barricade tape. They looked like the cheesiest Guitar Center ad you could possibly imagine come-to-life.

I know, I know, there’s obviously an audience for that kinda music, otherwise there wouldn’t have been anyone there watching them, right?

Wrong.

The half-empty room was littered with co-workers, family members, girlfriends, boyfriends(!), members of other bands playing that night, their co-workers, family members, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc. It's a safe bet that I was the only one there who didn't have a direct personal connection to one of the bands.

That didn’t stop the singer, though, who fancied himself quite the nu-metal Bono from launching into a spittle-filled tirade where he alternately bragged that every record label in town wanted to sign them (I had no idea Canoga Park was such a record industry hotbed), then railed against said labels for trying to force the band into being something that they weren’t. He then dedicated the next song to “all the record company weasels in the audience tonight” before the band lurched into another riff-laden workout that was called either “Leashes” or “Leeches”. Frankly, either one would have worked, I guess.


I surveyed the smattering of bored onlookers, hoping to spot someone who might pass for a record company weasel, but found no takers. I did notice a lot of people with that same “please kill me” look in their eyes that I get whenever I’m forced to attend the wedding of one of my girlfriend’s co-worker’s brother’s ex-business partner’s cousin. Or my own wedding, for that matter (but don’t tell my girlfriend I said that, okay?).

The idea of some kid sitting in his room, trying to put his most heartfelt feelings into words and writing songs that he hopes might give somebody somewhere the strength to carry on, but that if he sings in a voice that sounds like Cookie Monster in a fit of ‘roid rage, that would be ...fucking bad-ASS!

But, dude, it’s been done.

For every one thousand bands that formed with no other purpose than to sound like everybody else (and get laid), there’s one R.E.M., or Nirvana, or Cheap Trick, or Tom Petty who, whether they intended to do so or not, actually managed to stand out from the crowd. Ten, twenty, or thirty years later, here we are still talking about them, still buying their records.

So, why the fuck does every new band I hear sound like fucking Alter Bridge, aspiring to be no better than a third-rate knock-off of a band that wasn’t that special in the first place?

Because, apparently, you can do that and still get laid. And signed.


With the band still knee-deep in either leashes or leeches, my girlfriend, bless her soul, recognizing my “please kill me” face and drags me out of the joint so that we can stop by our favorite little martini bar before the DJ starts cranking the hip-hop at a volume that makes conversation impossible.

Upon arrival, we spend the first hour catching up with members of the staff we’ve befriended over the past couple years, but haven’t seen for months due to our relocation to the other side of the San Fernando Valley. One of the bartenders, a college-age woman who had moved here from Singapore to attend college, boasts of her decision to drop out of college to start an emo band.

Any gigs, I ask? “No, but we have a MySpace page with over 15,000 friends,” she beams.

As fond of her as I am, I cann’t help but feel there was an ocean of difference between her quitting school to form one of a gazillion emo bands with a sentence-long name that will never get out of the garage and, say, Andy Summers giving up his paying gig with Kevin Ayers to throw his lot in with a then-unknown and unproven band called the Police.

Never mind that Sting had already done much the same thing a year earlier, leaving a steady-gigging neo-jazz band to relocate to London with no band, no options, and a wife & infant son to support. There was obviously something driving both he and Andy. Their dreams weren't fueled by a desire to get rich quick, though. Despite initially jumped on the punk bandwagon (which was really Stewart Copeland's idea and one never embraced by Sting or Andy), they quickly hit upon a sound that was the result of a plethora of different influences, but entirely their own.

Not everyone take ends as happily as the Police story, though.

The world is full of insanely talented musicians who jumped into the unknown without a net and crashed well short of fulfilling their potential. Yet, these days, we seem to be much too eager to celebrate the supposed greatness of kids whose idea of paying dues is to wait in line overnight for a chance to audition for a nationally-televised karaoke show.

Where’s the risk in that?

More importantly, what passion do any of these kids have other than a mindless desire to be famous?

A handful of seasons into the AI franchise, we now face our first season of the same template applied to rock bands, which means we have approximately five years before every rock band on the planet is playing by AI's rules, even the ones who fancy themselves black-nail-polish-wearing outsiders.

That, of course, is the dangerous part of this whole scenario: The longer such superficiality is celebrated, the more paying one’s dues will forever give way to taking career shortcuts. Just like no American-born high school graduate would be caught dead working at a job that involves wearing a paper hat, young bands will soon be too good to slog it out at the local dive bar for a couple years, learning their craft before graduating to the next level. To paraphrase the words of Freddie Mercury, they want it all, they want it all, they want it all, and they want it now.


Mark my words, there will be very few people celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of albums by the likes of kORN, or Avril Lavigne, or Limp Bizkit, or Creed, or Kid Rock (who couldn’t get arrested a couple years ago, but can’t NOT get arrested with a new CD to promote).

Not that they aren’t already trying to convince us otherwise. Just last, week, I came across the 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of the Crystal Method’s “Vegas” and guffawed so hard, I almost pulled a kidney. And this is from someone who bought the record when it was released in '97 (and traded it in at a used CD store a couple weeks later.

We will still be celebrating the anniversaries of albums by the likes of Pink Floyd, the Beatles, David Bowie, Bob Dylan and so on and so forth. Of course, the reason why is obvious: Compared to what passes for new music these days, those 30-year-old albums sound positively amazing.

As long as Gwen Stefani keeps putting out solo records to help sell her latest line of clothes, perfumes, and harajuku dolls, the more discerning music lovers will flock to the Dark Side of The Moon.

And suddenly, as if on-cue, I hear the words to a twenty-year-old Talking Heads song in my head…

“Well, we know where we’re goin’
But we don’t know where we’ve been
And we know what we’re knowin’
But we can’t say what we’ve seen

And we’re not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out

We're on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin' that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride…”



Which is reason enough for me to drop some live Talking Heads tracks from what I personally consider to be their prime-era, 1978-1980 (not that I knew it at the time, truth be told, having just ended a dreadful pre-teen KISS phase).

Enjoy!

Warning Sign
Artists Only
Psycho Killer
Stay Hungry
Cities
I Zimbra
Drugs
Take Me To The River
Crosseyed And Painless
Life During Wartime
Houses In Motion