Back in the day bands were great and the music was great and stuff. Now I'm old and the kid's music is bad and what's wrong with kids these days. I recall as a teenager listening to Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, Crime of the Century by Supertramp, Black Sabbath. Really great stuff. My life's soundtrack. That experience was shared by millions, and possibly was the biggest not-so-secret club in history. All us cool kids listened to that stuff while we smoked cigarettes and rolled joints using the album covers to shake the seeds out. On weekends we'd go into the bushes and drink beer til we puked. We were the coolest ever. Nowadays cigarettes are out and booze is in. All the TV lawyer and cop shows are drinking straight whiskey after a hard day of blood spattered mayhem and pulling obscure laws out of their asses to wipe the smirk off the opposing council. They have hard liquor ads promising nerds they'll get laid during the Simpsons. As mentioned before, my other gig when I'm not recording or gigging is a designated driver. One of them dealios where I drive you home in your own car while my partner follows in a chase car. I of course do that more than recording, no thanks to you assholes. ...Ha. Anyways, I drive a lot of young drunk kids around, and I've noticed a few things that on the surface make little sense. The music is awful. In fact putting much of it even in the category of music is a stretch. Subsonic bass and looped synthesized crap sounds with angry spoken poetry. All of it the same meter, same beat, same sounds, all computer corrected, quantized synthetic autotuned drivel bad bad bad. Driving a carload of kids with a crappy stereo and 1200 watts of sub cranked to distortion is like a visit to the ear dentist. First you get the steel pointy thing picking at your brain dislodging chunks of intelligence, then comes the long needle poking you in the soft ouchy bits. You hope there's enough local anesthetic in there to ease the imminent arrival of the high pitched drill, but there never is. Then the drill arrives in the form of some pissed off asshole yelling. Just as you think you it couldn't get any worse, the bass drops and you poop yourself. You drive along thinking you got this far and you're still alive, but no. All the dumbass kids in the car start to rap along with pissed off yelling guy to show off how well they know the words. Then you have 5 or 6 people yelling in unison and a load in your shorts. That's the point where the telephone poles whizzing past start to look attractive. It would be my little contribution to music. They all clamor to get their phones bluetoothed up so they can play their jam, and each jam is another trip to the ear dentist. The part that confuses me is the kids like that stuff every bit as much as we liked our stuff. Don't they realize it's really bad? Don't they know a mouse is not actually a musical instrument? That subsonic sound plays a very small part in the spectrum of sound? And that 1200 watts through half blown subs is really really awful? Are the kids today all stupid or what? Well no, actually. We're the stupid ones. The teen and early adult years is where we make the transition from parent created utopia to the horrors of reality. We start out buying the crap sprayed from our parents about Santa and love and how we can be president if we want, then we hit our teens and reality begins to slowly kick the lies out of our cozy little world. Kids aren't stupid. They spot the booze ads in the Simpsons and watch us spew on endlessly about the evils of smoking. We give more air time and spend more hours talking about Donald Trump, the leader of All That Is Stupid, than we do to any real issues. We build massive bridges to toll the Canada-wide migration of homeless to their winter feeding grounds at Hastings and Main. They step carefully around needles and condoms on their way to school. We spout vacuous platitudes about how to conduct one's self through life in peace and harmony and do the exact opposite to grind more dough from the poor. We blither on about carbon footprints and recycling while killing the planet with a greedy free for all on resources. We tell them to treat animals with respect, then torture them in tiny cages with hormones until we slaughter and eat them. They begin to suspect we're idiots. Music is the window to the soul, and the window works both ways. Kids need bad music to vent their total outrage at our pompous stupidity. If we liked it there would be no message. They can't just say "you people are idiots", because we'll agree with them. There's little dispute that we are in fact idiots. So music is the only way to vocalize their utter disgust without joining gangs or taking up meth. Kids need bad music to point out how completely we screwed everything up and then lied about it, and how pissed off they are about the whole business. Essentially they're just giving back all the horrid things we gave to them, and essentiallier, we did it to ourselves by being idiots when our parents passed us the baton. So there's that. Now get off my lawn before I call the cops. Fortunately, I'm in no danger of alienating any potential clients with this rant. This is as for because I are not cool by today's standards. Thank God. I actually don't mind some of the current top 40. Adele kix ass. As ranted about before, every era of music has the gems that last. I digs this one, Royals by Lorde. Genius in it's simplicity. Great stuff will continue, the kids will grow up and have kids, then those kids will plumb new depths of aural dentistry for their folks and we'll laugh our asses off. Or possibly not. The next thing might be a new level of improv jazz or something equally horrific. BTW, in that last link the vocals start around 55 seconds in. Well worth the wait.