500 Channels And Nothing On

This commentary is a long time coming, so here goes.

If, like me, you've felt this burgeoning sense that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, you've probably also noticed that, despite the fact that we have more of everything at our disposal, the quality of everything has gone down considerably.

My theory is that having 500 channels (all in HD, woo hoo) doesn't necessarily mean that there is actually anything worth watching. I mean, seriously, how many times have you been wide awake at 2AM and found nothing on?

By the same token, everybody's got a band these days, it seems. Just because modern advances make it possible for some tone-deaf or, at best, mediocre band to record their songs on the bass player's computer and have tracks uploaded to their MySpace page in mere minutes doesn't necessarily mean they should. Yet, even before such technology was available, such bands were still able to afford to cut a demo and have 1,000 CD's pressed up (950 of which are sitting in the drummer's closet). Shit, as of ten years ago, there were already too many bands foisting their latest coffee coaster upon the world.

Back in the day, of course, when it took some serious cash to pay for quality demos and CD replication, such expenses kept most crap bands locked up in their garage, where they belonged.

And that was a necessary gatekeeper of sorts that ensured that the landscape wasn't so littered with crap bands, unwanted CD's, and the like.

To go back to the days when I was getting my start, it was even more of an undertaking for a band to create actual "product". Back then, if a band had an actual album (what's an album, you ask?) - no, not a cassette! - you took them seriously.

On the Chicago scene, for example, I was one of the first indie artists to go the CD route and that was only because I found a label to sign me up. Back then, it was all about cassettes and vinyl. Cassettes were cheesy, vinyl was cool, and CD's were still almost a foreign format to many. I can't tell you how many potential sales we lost because the label I was signed to in '88 was CD-only. Heck, I didn't even own a CD player at the time.

But the minute I started sending my CD to clubs and magazines and labels, I noticed an immediate interest in what I was doing. I was getting bookings I had tried unsuccessfully for months to get when all I had was a cassette demo. Same songs, mind you, but, with a high-quality package in-hand, I was now legit.

A few years later, the playing field had been leveled considerably and every band able to scrape together a couple grand was putting out their own CD. Then, of course, a little band called Nirvana blew onto the national scene and fucked things up but good.

See, Nirvana were great, but many of the bands they influenced and inspired were not. When they saw Nirvana, they didn't see the quality of the songs. Instead, they saw a guy that played out of tune if he felt like it, trashed his guitars, dressed in ripped jeans and torn t-shirts, and pretended not to care about a goddamn thing. Pretty soon, the whole place was full of bands that looked like they'd just gotten off of work from the local Jiffy Lube and were hell-bent on wallowing in their own self-pity in some dive bar.

I remember talking to Joe Shanahan, who ran and handled bookings for the legendary Metro in Chicago at the time. He told me, "It used to be I could tell by listening to a band's music whether they were pulling my leg - 'Oh, we're signed to a major label, blah blah blah' - but after Nirvana hit, that changed. Bands that would not have had a chance in hell of getting signed were landing million-dollar deals."

And it has gone downhill steadily ever since. Today, you've got bands who can barely play a note making records. And getting signed. And becoming hugely successful. And having careers.

Radio has become completely unlistenable. MTV has become a complete non-factor in the breaking of new artists. And the labels themselves have come thiiiiis close to taking themselves right out of the game.

All of the above used to be the gatekeepers that kept at least a modicum of quality intact (although crap bands still managed to get signed, just not quite so many).

Nowadays, some slimy Asian chick who couldn't have gotten arrested a decade ago racks up a million friends on MySpace, lands a record deal, and gets her own TV show.

Bands that would have never gotten past annoying the neighbors are now hitting you with MySpace bulletins every hour on the hour to promote their upcoming gig at CMJ or SXSW or some other such event that used to be full of cool new acts, but now looks like the fallout from an explosion at the Hot Topic warehouse. And, because there are so many of these bands filling up your in-box, you find yourself taking a blasé approach to all bands vying for your attention.

Musically speaking, there are too many channels and nothing good on any of them.

That's incredibly sad because, even when there weren't so many crap bands out there, there were still tons of great bands that couldn't get arrested. Now, of course, those bands are struggling even harder to find an audience. What's also sad is that there is a huge audience out there hungry for great music. The trouble is that there are no longer any trustworthy gatekeepers, no taste makers, and, thus, artist and audience are having a hard time finding one another.

I hate to say it, though, but I think the genie is so far out of the bottle that there's no putting it back in.

"Oh Darren, that just sounds like sour grapes, man."

Hey, you could very well be right. This isn't about me, the artist, though. This is about me, the guy who used to religiously hit all the cool record stores in town, spending hundreds of bucks a month on new music.

The fact that there are barely any record stores left doesn't even bother me at this point because, truth be told, as of a few years ago, there stopped being any real reason to walk into a record store. The bins were so full of all the crap released over the last ten years that I found myself just shaking my head at it all.

What an absolute fucking waste.