I’m getting really sick of this shit
I swear I have a really bad memory. Every so often, I’ll get in my car, and rather than put on NPR or a CD, I’ll take a chance with commercial radio.
What a waste of my time.
The state of the radio has gotten out of control. When something bad works for the stations, and I mean “works” in a commercial sense, their response is to come out with something that manages to be worse. My case in point is Nickelback.
There’s always been a lot of crap out there, and there always will be, but Nickelback seems to have figured out the exact formula that it takes to be absolutely awful, yet just catchy enough to get played over and over again.
I don’t remember what their first song was that I heard, but I know it was before the one that appeared in “Spider-Man.” I haven’t even had to try very hard to put it out of my mind. I also don’t recall it being very good.
There’s something about a grown man with a perm droning on and on about how a hero’s going to save the day that’ll make you forget about pretty much anything that’s even the slightest bit less awful.
The song “Hero” has a few issues. It’s not any one thing. I can usually forgive a song if it doesn’t have the greatest lyrics, as long as it’s reasonably creative or interesting musically. A song doesn’t even need to blow my socks off. There are a lot of really great songs out there, that I happen to like, that have some critical flaws. Hell, there are entire bands that fit that description.
An easy example is MC Hawking, and yes, I know that MC Hawking is not a band, or a real person for that matter. What he is, however, is a great idea. The very concept of Stephen Hawking as a gangsta rapper — a gangsta rapper who makes 50 Cent look like a pussy — is so off the wall that is has to be worth looking at. The songs are hit or miss, but the ideas are all great, and the fact that somebody out there can make a computer voice rhyme about science and violence to a respectable beat is just as good, if not better, than the concept itself.
Nickelback would disagree. “Hero” is boring and bland from the get-go. Musically and lyrically, it’s pure monotony. It sounds a lot like something that a high school student might write when he’s running late for his creative writing class. Maybe they were commissioned to write this for the movie and they just didn’t have a lot to work with. Well the Ramones proved a long time ago that songs about Spider-Man can be good.
I’m pretty sure that the whole idea of Nickelback is built on a bad premise. I can imagine that the guys were hanging around, drinking some Budweiser and eating Big Macs when someone jokingly said, “Hey, we’re good friends. We should make a band.”
“What kind of band?” another asked.
“Definitely a rock band,” the first replied.
And then they all agreed with no further discussion about whether anybody had any musical talent or songwriting ability that they would henceforth be known as Nickelback because, well, just because.
The fact that they have no songwriting talent is plain to see, but it’s debatable whether they have any musical talent. Their songs are so toothless musically that even if they had talent, they’d never get the chance to show it off with the crap that they play.
That’s sort of what set me off in the first place. I’ve been hearing the song “Photograph” virtually every time I press the wrong button on my radio, and it’s really, really bad. There are a lot of bad songs out there, but this is just boring. The took the magic recipe that they used to create “Hero” and added an extra dash of every ingredient. The result is about six hours of cumulative airtime on the radio every day.
I know that the Clear Channel autocracy and the big labels force feed a lot of bad music into our ears, but why this? And why so much? Every band has bad songs, and even bad albums, but do you hear “Love is Strong” or “Sympathy for the Devil” more often when a Stones song comes on the radio?
Money keeps the music and commercial radio industries alive, but I just can’t see where the money is in bad songs. This goes far beyond Nickelback, and far beyond every Rolling Stones album from the 1990s. If you want to keep people listening to your radio station, wouldn’t you at least repeat a good song until people hated it?
Why start with something that’s so easy to hate? Are they that desperate to keep payola alive that they’ll pay off every DJ and station manager at every pop and alternative station? “Alternative,” of course, along with “new rock,”is just another word these days that means “pop for a different demographic.” That demographic is usually teenage boys and apparently, people with no taste.
If that’s the way it is, well then there’s not much I can do about it, except maybe kick a few bucks toward my local public radio station. MC Hawking, on the other hand, has stronger words.
