Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
I read that movie revenues this year are the lowest they’ve been since 1997, and ticket prices cost more than ever.
Memo to Hollywood: Your movies are, with fairly rare exceptions, dull.
It’s not that the acting is bad or the plots absurd. A good number of contemporary movies are solid. Special effects are better than ever. It’s just that we’ve seen it before.
Quit rehashing the formula, and don’t expect special effects to bring new life to the same old thing.
The same goes for music.
Music revenues have been going up, probably because average CD prices have actually gone down. I find I buy more CDs when prices average $10 to $12 as opposed to $18. Then we have the whole lawsuit threat against illegal downloads, although how much that has impacted overall revenues is questionable.
Record companies shouldn’t feel that good about it though. Growth through volume or suing your listening thieves will only carry the same old thing so far. Independent and minor record labels are seeing more of my money all the time.
I dropped into Wal-Mart last week to see what new stuff might be out. Unlike the boss, I’ve got no real moral beef with Wal-Mart’s dominance, but I rarely shop there. Here’s why: no selection. Just try to order an obscure Alice Cooper CD through Wal-Mart. Last time I tried, it didn’t happen.
But it’s the closest place to Sweet Home to buy a new CD. That being the case, I stopped in to check out the latest in popular titles. My friends will attest that I cannot walk through a CD store or department and walk away without buying something. It’s probably my worst habit.
Wal-Mart has these little scanner devices on its merchandise racks that play back low-quality samples of the CDs. They play exactly the same advertisement over and over again with each CD sample. Strangely, I have no clue what the sample was trying to sell ? I managed to completely tune it out. Problem was, in tuning out the ads, I also managed to tune out the music samples I wanted to hear.
I started in the A’s and worked my all the way to the Z’s. My goal was to find something, anything, new that didn’t sound like the All-American Idiots, better known as Green Day or close relatives Blink 182 and Eve 6 or the Ataris. I call it modern, happy, shiny punk ? And I can’t tell the difference between one band and the next.
The music is fine. I even like some of the bands for that tiny shred of originality that makes them slightly recognizable ? the Ataris, for example. But mostly, when you buy one of those CDs, you’ve bought them all. The music isn’t bad. It’s on key, and the instrumentation is fine. It’s just supremely uninteresting.
The modern music scene has one other type of song, I mean band, I mean genre ? Whatever. Wal-Mart had a whole pile of bands that have this pseudo ’80s punk-metal thing going, a melodic vocal accented with death metal growls and screams. It works for Finch and Coheed and Cambria, but enough is enough. Five hundred bands doing it is supremely uninteresting.
I chose Hot Apple Pie, recently here at the Jamboree, off the country shelf. I was amazed that country music, the perpetual king of cloned music, was offering something with more than one song repeated 10 times on the CD.
I recalled hearing an All-American Rejects song somewhere and liking it. At least I thought I did. I figured I’d give that band a shot. But I didn’t make it out of Lebanon before I popped that one right out of the player and inserted Hot Apple Pie.
Quite the depressing outing, and I don’t want to talk about how much time I spent scrounging through Wal-Mart’s offerings.
I was hoping for a copy of Rush’s “Hemispheres,” but I didn’t expect Wal-Mart to have it. I wasn’t disappointed. I was surprised to see any Rush titles at all. Sadly absent was a gem I woundn’t find until I went back to hunting for “Hemispheres” (at other stores) on the weekend: The new Alice Cooper CD, “Dirty Diamonds.”
That outing was as wonderful as my trip to Wal-Mart was disappointing. Both Circuit City and Warehouse Music have far more available than Wal-Mart; and Warehouse will import and special order music.
It’s just telling that the best music was old. The Rush CD was recorded in 1978, and Alice Cooper is a brilliant reject of the greatest time in music, the 1960s.
Music now is sort of like it was in the late 1980s with the hair metal. There was good music, and pretty much all of it was adequate. It was just all the same. Nirvana and Pearl Jam killed the hair bands with their pathetic whimpering. Pretty soon all bands hated themselves and wished they were dead instead of famous. Angst prevailed, but somewhere along the way, some good music caught hold. The late 1990s were almost as fresh and original as the 1960s when rock ‘n’ roll was new.
Bands like the Gin Blossoms, Goo Goo Dolls, the Foo Fighters, Creed, System of a Down, Disturbed and many others grew popular. I didn’t like all of them, but we had a variety to choose from. They carried that flame on into the new millennium, but now it feels like we’re back to Square One. New music is all cloned. Maybe that’s what Alice Cooper was talking about when he joined the New Wave craze and sang, “We’re all clones.”
I can’t figure out where anyone ever got the idea that rock ‘n’ roll was about rebellion and individuality. It’s about nothing so much as conformity with vague choreographed variations.
The 1990s gave birth to the Refreshments, now indie band Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, and what a band. Clever lyrics on par with Alice Cooper and a great southwestern edge take this band to the top of the pack. The Peacemakers played to a packed venue in Portland two weeks ago, playing almost three hours in what they thought was the hottest gig they ever played.
Drummer P.H. Naffah told a friend of mine that he was from Arizona. He was used to air conditioning. But they gave everything for one of their best shows ever. The band cleaned up quickly then stepped outside their bus to meet fans, taking time to chat extensively with all who waited to meet them. The Peacemakers are a class act and perfection on stage.
They lead a pack of bands that borrow their influences from anything, from country to punk. It’s bands like this one, Shurman and Cross Canadian Ragweed, which also appeared this year at the Jamboree, that give hope that rock ‘n’ roll may one day stand proud again.
Crazy enough, Shurman is attracting interest through CMT, and Cross Canadian Ragweed was the most interesting thing happening at the Jamboree this year.
The music is hard to classify. Some call it Americana. Others call it alt-country. Ragweed described itself as southern rock, but they don’t rightly fit that bill either. And all three of these bands are distinctive and unique, their music crossing several genres in the course of a single album.
Keith Urban, when he performed at the Jamboree a couple years ago, talked in his promotional biography about how he wanted to tell people he plays country music; but saying that, he wanted the next question to be, “What kind?”